New Diversity Combining Receivers for Cooperative Multiplexing in Wireless Multiuser Relay Networks

We propose two new diversity combining receivers that support cooperative multiplexing in two-hop wireless multiuser relay networks. Cooperative multiplexing has the potential to double the achievable throughput by allowing the base station (BS) and the relay station (RS) to transmit to different users at the same time in the second time slot of the half time division duplexed (TDD) relay transmission. This throughput improvement comes at a cost of performance degradation due to inter-user interference between the BS and the RS. To overcome this degradation, we propose two new receivers for the relay-link users: (1) cooperative multiplexing optimum combining (CMOC) and (2) cooperative multiplexing selection combining (CMSC). The proposed CMOC receiver combines the signals in the first and second time slot of the half TDD transmission such that the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is maximized. The proposed CMSC receiver allows the relay-link user terminal to be active in only one of the two half TDD time slots. As such, CMSC offers power savings relative to CMOC. New insights are drawn from our exact closed-form expressions that we derive for the moment generation function, probability density function, and the cumulative distribution function of the output SINR. Based on these, we present new analytical expressions for the outage probability, symbol error rate, and achievable throughput. Our results show a 3.5 times improvement in the achievable throughput relative to the standard single-channel receiver in the high interference regime.