Systems, apparatuses, and methods for enhancement for amplify-and-forward relay. Instead of merely passing received signal from a source, relay may equalize the received signal based on reference signal contained in the received signal, before amplifying and transmitting the signal to a destination. Compared to amplify-and-forward, equalize-and-forward may compensate the received source signal for various imperfections such as channel distortions and phase errors, using demodulation reference signal and phase tracking reference signal. The relay may apply Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to equalize the signal in tone domain.