• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.12A
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• pp.949-961
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• 2009

This paper analyses BER (Bit Error Rate) performance of 2-hop wireless communications networks with hybrid decode-and-forward (HDF) relays. The conventional HDF method is usually based on the receive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the relay to decide whether to forward the decoded data in order to obviate the erroneous detection at the relay. In contrast, we propose a new solution of using log-likelihood ratio (LLR) as an efficient alternative to SNR. The approximate BER expressions of different HDF schemes are also derived and verified by Monte-Carlo simulations. In addition, we compute the optimum thresholds for HDF schemes. A variety of numerical results demonstrate that the new LLR-based HDF significantly outperforms the SNR-based HDF for any threshold level and relay location under flat Rayleigh fading channel plus AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise).