Outage Probability and Power Efficiency of Quantize-and-Forward Relay in Multi-hop D2D Networks

Abstract

The fading effects that occur on the wireless signal during its propagation can deteriorate the performance and increase the power consumption of the system. A cooperative communication that utilizes other user devices as its relays to forward the information to a destination can address this problem. Moreover, a combination of cooperative communication with device-to-device (D2D) communication, known as cooperative D2D, is a promising candidate to be implemented in 5G technology. Therefore, we analyze the outage probability and power efficiency of a cooperative multi-hop D2D network using Quantize and Forward (QF) relay protocol. Then, we simulate the outage probability and power efficiency with respect to transmitted power, transmission distance, quantization level, and the number of relays in the network. The simulation results show that the outage probability of multi-hop QF relay decreases as the transmit power, the number of hops, and the quantization level increase. On the other hand, outage probability increases as the distance increases. Besides, the number of hops will also affect the average power efficiency of a cooperative D2D multi-hop relay network with QF protocol, in which the more hop relays used in the transmission path, the higher the average power efficiency, and consequently the better system performance.