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A Comparison of Soft and Hard Coded Relaying

"Amplify and Forward" and "Decode and Forward" are the two main relaying functions that have been proposed since the advent of cooperative communication. "\textit{Soft} Decode and Forward" is a recently introduced relaying principle that is to combine the benefits of the classical two relaying algorithms. In this work, we thoroughly investigate \textit{soft} relaying algorithms when convolutional or turbo codes are applied. We study the error performance of two cooperative scenarios employing soft-relaying. A novel approach, the mutual information loss due to data processing, is proposed to analyze the relay-based soft encoder. We also introduce a novel approach to derive the estimated bit error rate and the equivalent channel SNR for the relaying techniques considered in the paper.