In a slow fading channel, how to find a cooperative diversity scheme that
achieves the transmit diversity bound is still an open problem. In fact, all
previously proposed amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF)
schemes do not improve with the number of relays in terms of the diversity
multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) for multiplexing gains r higher than 0.5. In this
work, we study the class of slotted amplify-and-forward (SAF) schemes. We first
establish an upper bound on the DMT for any SAF scheme with an arbitrary number
of relays N and number of slots M. Then, we propose a sequential SAF scheme
that can exploit the potential diversity gain in the high multiplexing gain
regime. More precisely, in certain conditions, the sequential SAF scheme
achieves the proposed DMT upper bound which tends to the transmit diversity
bound when M goes to infinity. In particular, for the two-relay case, the
three-slot sequential SAF scheme achieves the proposed upper bound and
outperforms the two-relay non-orthorgonal amplify-and-forward (NAF) scheme of
Azarian et al. for multiplexing gains r < 2/3. Numerical results reveal a
significant gain of our scheme over the previously proposed AF schemes,
especially in high spectral efficiency and large network size regime.Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures, submitted to IEEE trans. IT, revised versio