Performance Analysis and Optimization of the Relay Multicast System with Space-Time Coding

Abstract

In a sector of a single cell, due to the fading characteristic of wireless channels, several decode-and-forward relay stations are deployed to form a two-hop relay-assisted multicast system. We propose two schemes for the system, the first scheme combines the use of space-time code and distributed space-time code (DSTC), and the second one combines the use of DSTC and maximum ratio combining. We give an outage probability analysis for both of them. Based on this analysis, we manage to maximize the spectral efficiency under a preset outage probability confinement by finding out the optimal power allocation and relay location strategies. We use genetic algorithms to verify our analysis and numerical results show that the schemes proposed by us significantly outperform the scheme in previous work. We also show the effect of path loss exponent on the optimal strategy.