Noncoherent Receiver for Decode-and-Forward Cooperative Systems with Multi-Antenna Equipped Destination

Abstract

This paper studies a maximum energy selection receiver for an adaptive decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative wireless system with multiple-antenna equipped destination. In particular, the destination selects the maximum output from all the outputs of the square-law detectors to perform the detection of the transmitted information. A close-form expression for the bit-error-rate (BER) is analytically derived when the system is deployed with binary frequency-shift keying (BFSK) modulation. The thresholds used at the relays to address the issue of error propagation are optimized to minimize the BER. While finding the optimal thresholds requires information on the average signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of all the transmission links in the system, the approximate thresholds at each relay that require only information on the average SNR of the source-corresponding relay are investigated. It is also derived that the system achieves a full diversity order with the approximate thresholds. Finally, both analytical and simulation results are provided to verify our analysis.