Relaying protocols for two colocated users

We consider a wireless network where a remote source sends information to one of two colocated users, and where the second user can serve as a relay. The source´s transmission is subjected to quasi-static flat Rayleigh fading, while the transmission of the relay experiences a fixed amplitude gain with a uniform random phase, capturing its close proximity to the destination. All communications share the same time/bandwith resources, and perfect channel state information is known only to the receivers. We propose relaying protocols which are based on Wyner-Ziv quantization at the relay, and demonstrate their high efficiency (in terms of expected throughput) with respect to previously reported relaying schemes based on amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward. A salient feature of these protocols is that the relay need not know the actual fading gain experienced by the destination in order to perform the quantization. We also consider a hybrid amplify-quantize-decode-and-forward scheme which exhibits superior performance.