Hybrid AF/DF Cooperative Relaying Technique with Phase Steering for Industrial IoT Networks

For the next generation of manufacturing, the industrial internet of things (IoT) has been considered as a key technology that enables smart factories, in which sensors transfer measured data, actuators are controlled, and systems are connected wirelessly. In particular, the wireless sensor network (WSN) needs to operate with low cost, low power (energy), and narrow spectrum, which are the most technical challenges for industrial IoT networks. In general, a relay-assisted communication network has been known to overcome scarce energy problems, and a spectrum-sharing technique has been considered as a promising technique for the radio spectrum shortage problem. In this paper, we propose a phase steering based hybrid cooperative relaying (PSHCR) technique for the generic relay-assisted spectrum-shared WSN, which consists of a secondary transmitter, multiple secondary relays (SRs), a secondary access point, and multiple primary access points. Basically, SRs in the proposed PSHCR technique operate with decode-and-forward (DF) relaying protocol, but it does not abandon the SRs that failed in decoding at the first hop. Instead, the SRs operate with amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol when they failed in decoding at the first hop. Furthermore, the SRs (regardless of operating with AF or DF protocol) that satisfy interference constraints to the primary network are allowed to transmit a signal to the secondary access point at the second hop. Note that phase distortion is compensated through phase steering operation at each relay node before second-hop transmission, and thus all relay nodes can operate in a fully distributed manner. Finally, we validate that the proposed PSHCR technique significantly outperforms the existing best single relay selection (BSR) technique and cooperative phase steering (CPS) technique in terms of outage performance via extensive computer simulations.