Relay Assisted Cooperative OSTBC Communication with SNR Imbalance and Channel Estimation Errors

TL;DR

This paper investigates a relay-assisted cooperative OSTBC system in cellular downlink, analyzing the effects of SNR imbalance and channel estimation errors, revealing that SNR imbalance does not affect diversity order but estimation errors do.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the impact of SNR imbalance and channel estimation errors on cooperative OSTBC performance in Rayleigh fading environments.

Findings

SNR imbalance does not affect the spatial diversity order.

Channel estimation errors significantly degrade system performance.

Simulation results confirm the analytical findings.

Abstract

In this paper, a two-hop relay assisted cooperative Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (OSTBC) transmission scheme is considered for the downlink communication of a cellular system, where the base station (BS) and the relay station (RS) cooperate and transmit data to the user equipment (UE) in a distributed fashion. We analyze the impact of the SNR imbalance between the BS-UE and RS-UE links, as well as the imperfect channel estimation at the UE receiver. The performance is analyzed in the presence of Rayleigh flat fading and our results show that the SNR imbalance does not impact the spatial diversity order. On the other hand, channel estimation errors have a larger impact on the system performance. Simulation results are then provided to confirm the analysis.