The University of British Columbia

We assess the benefits of relaying techniques with regard to the performance of ECMA-368 ultra wideband radio systems. To this end, we closely follow the current ECMA-368 standard and adopt the IEEE 802.15.3a channel models. Focus is on compatible relaying techniques that require a minimum of change to the current system specifications. In particular, we consider decode-and-forward (D amp;F) and amplify-and-forward (A amp;F) relaying and combine these techniques with a distributed version of cyclic delay diversity (CDD) performed across relays. Our results show that, as long as the relays are located sufficiently close to the source node, both D amp;F and A amp;F relaying achieve significant performance gains over direct transmission, even in the case of correlated shadowing. Furthermore, we find that the distributed CDD scheme yields little improvements compared to simple A amp;F and D amp;F relaying, since the employed channel coding scheme already picks up a large amount microscopic diversity.