Physical layer multicasting over 2-hop network using dual amplify and forward relay

The inherent multicast nature of the wireless medium can be exploited over two hop networks paves a way for Physical layer multicasting. The system performance gain can be achieved through multicast diversity achieved with dual amplify-and-forward (AF) Relay schemes. The dual AF relay multicast scheme is proposed in this paper for cooperative and non-cooperative relays. An upper bound has derived for non-cooperative case using the well-known inequality between geometric and harmonic mean of positive random variables. At low SNR, the performance of this multicast scheme with cooperative relays is better than the non-cooperative one and after 12 dB there is no performance gain with the cooperative relays. The performance with cooperative relay can achieve 4 dB gain over virtual MIMO.