Performance enhancement of relay-assisted communications via binary feedback

Abstract

This paper proposes a modified two-hop wireless communication system and studies its performance. The modified system has a reliable feedback channel that carries a binary signal from the receiver to inform the transmitter about the current state of the channel, and hence affects transmission decision. In the analysis, both regenerative and non-regenerative systems are considered. Outage probability, which is the probability of having the link quality below a certain threshold is used as the performance assessment tool. Numerical results show that binary feedback greatly improves the performance of two-hop systems, specially when the transmission threshold is set close to the outage threshold. They also show that non-regenerative systems with binary feedback can outperform regenerative systems without any feedback.