A Two-Hop AF Relaying Scheme With Interference Suppression at the Relay

We consider a system with a source, a relay, and a destination with an arbitrary number of cochannel interferers and thermal noise at both the relay and the destination. The relay is equipped with multiple antennas, whereas the destination has a single antenna with limited interference mitigation capabilities. For such a system, we propose a two-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying scheme, where the relay performs optimum combining to maximize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and forwards the soft symbols to the destination. We derive the cumulative distribution function of an upper bound on the end-to-end SINR achievable with such relay in Rayleigh fading channels. The achievable diversity and outage probability performance are analyzed using the bound and simulations. Block error rate performance at the destination is studied and a practical application in cellular networks is discussed. The results show that the proposed relay can assist a destination with a single antenna, which was experiencing lower SINR in the absence of the relay, to achieve higher values of SINR.