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) cooperativewireless system with multiple-antenna equipped destination. In particular, the destination selects the maximum outputfrom all the outputs of the square-law detectors to perform the detection of the transmitted information. A close-formexpression for the bit-error-rate (BER) is analytically derived when the system is deployed with binary frequency-shiftkeying (BFSK) modulation. The thresholds used at the relays to address the issue of error propagation are optimized tominimize 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 theaverage SNR of the source-corresponding relay are investigated. It is also derived that the system achieves a full diversityorder with the approximate thresholds. Finally, both analytical and simulation results are provided to verify our analysis.