Phase-Rotation-Aided Relay Selection in Two-Way Decode-and-Forward Relay Networks

This paper proposes a relay selection (RS) scheme that aims to improve the end-to-end symbol error rate (SER) performance of a two-way relay network (TWRN). The TWRN consists of two single-antenna sources and multiple relays employing a decode-and-forward (DF) protocol. It is shown that the SER performance is determined by the minimum decision distance (DD) observed in the TWRN. However, the minimum DD is likely to be made arbitrarily small by channel fading. To tackle this problem, a phase rotation (PR)-aided RS scheme is proposed to enlarge the minimum DD, which, in turn, improves the SER performance. The proposed PR-based scheme rotates the phases of the transmitted symbols of one source and of the selected relay according to the channel state information (CSI), aiming for increasing all DDs to be above a desired bound. The lower bound is further optimized by using a MaxMin-RS criterion associated with the channel gains. It is demonstrated that the PR-aided MaxMin-RS approach achieves full diversity gain and improved array gain. Furthermore, compared with the existing DF-based schemes, the proposed scheme allows more flexible relay antenna configurations.