Multi-antenna assisted virtual full-duplex relaying with reliability-aware iterative decoding

In this paper, a multi-antenna assisted virtual full-duplex (FD) relaying with reliability-aware iterative decoding at destination node is proposed to improve system spectral efficiency and reliability. This scheme enables two half-duplex relay nodes, mimicked as FD relaying, to alternatively serve as transmitter and receiver to forward their received signals regardless of the decoding errors. Meanwhile, the inter-relay interference is cancelled with QR-decomposition. Then, by deploying the proposed reliability-aware iterative detection/decoding process at destination node, the inter-frame interference and error propagation effect can be simultaneously mitigated. Simulation results show that, without extra cost of time delay and signalling overhead, our proposed scheme outperforms the conventional selective decode-and-forward (S-DF) relaying schemes, such as cyclic redundancy check based S-DF relaying and threshold based S-DF relaying, by up to 8 dB in terms of bit-error-rate.