Performance analysis of the HARQ dynamic decode-and-forward protocol.

The explosive growth of data trafficc in wireless communication systems comes together with the urgent need to minimize its environmental and financial impact.Therefore, the main objective in the field of green radio communication is to improve the energy efficiency of wireless communication systems with respect to the future performance demands on the wireless communication infrastructure. In this context, recent research in cooperative and cognitive communication techniques attracts particular attention.While cognitive radio improves spectral efficiency by enhanced spectrum utilization, cooperative communication techniques achieve remarkable gains in spectral efficiency by enabling the terminals to share their resources. In particular, creating virtual multi-antenna arrays by antenna sharing enables exploitation of spatial diversity gains and multiplexing gains within a network of single antenna terminals. This technique is particularly attractive for mobile wireless networks, since power and space constraints often prohibit the integration of multiple antennas into mobile terminals.This work studies the performance of the hybrid automatic repeat-request (HARQ) dynamic decode-and-forward (DDF) protocol in the half-duplex relay channel. The reason behind exploration of the HARQ-DDF protocol is that it achieves the optimal performance in terms of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) and the diversity-multiplexing-delay tradeoff(DMDT). However, DMT and DMDT are evaluated as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) approaches infinity.In practice, key performance measures are the fixed-rate outage probability and delay-limited throughput achieved at the SNR expected during operation. To this end, it is common practice to give the performance of the DDF protocol as a function of the source-to-destination channel SNR (SD-SNR). In this dissertation the focus is to study the performance of the HARQ-DDF protocol measured as a function of the SNR as seen at the destination (D-SNR).This approach enables the performance comparison with the HARQ-SISO and the HARQ-MISO protocol from an energy efficiency perspective on the system level. Furthermore, a novel variant of the HARQ-MISO protocol, the hybrid repeat-with-diversity-request (HARDQ) MISO protocol, is introduced.Considering outage probability as measure of reliability, closed-form solutions and simulation results show that the HARDQ-MISO and the HARQ-DDF protocol outperform the HARQ-MISO protocol from an energy efficiency point ofview. From a delay-limited throughput point of view the HARQ-MISO protocol is beneficial. It is demonstrated that code-rate assignment allows to achieve significant performance gains in terms of delay-limited throughput. Furthermore, reducing the decoding cost using code-rate assignment techniques comes together with only negligible performance loss