Opportunistic Relaying Schemes for Amplify and Forward Bidirectional Relay Channels with Multi antenna Sources

We consider a two-way relay network where the Amplify-and-Forward (AF) protocol is adopted by all relays in this paper.The network consists of two multi-antenna source nodes and multiple distributed single-antenna relays.Two opportunistic relaying schemes are proposed to efficiently utilize the antennas of the source nodes and the relay nodes.In the first scheme,the best relay is selected out by a max-min-max criterion before transmitting.After that,at each source,only the antenna with the largest channel gain between itself and the best relay is activated to transmit and receive signals with full power.In the second scheme,assisted by the best relay which is selected by the typical max-min criterion,both source nodes use all their antennas to exchange data,and match filter beamforming techniques are employed at both source nodes.Further analyses show that all schemes can achieve the full diversity order,and the conclusions are not only mathematically demonstrated but numerically illustrated.System performance comparisons are carried out by numerical methods in terms of rate sum and outage probability,respectively.The beamforming assisted scheme can be found to be superior to the antenna selection scheme when accurate Channel State Information (CSI) is available at the transmitters.Otherwise,the latter is very suitable.