On the performance of FBMC-based AF and DF Multiple Access Relay Networks

We investigate the performance of Filter Bank Multi-Carrier (FBMC)-based dual-hop Amplify-and-Forward (AF) and static Decode-and-Forward (DF) in the context of Multiple access relay networks. We show that, in the context of Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) communications and their implementation constraints, AF protocol is more suitable than DF one. In fact, the former protocol requires low complexity and just a single receive antenna at the relay node rather than two for the latter. Furthermore, we show that AF and DF protocols present almost similar BER performances in the case of a relay with a single Transmit antenna for both ZF and MMSE equalizers.