Signal Space Cooperative Communication With Partial Relay Selection.
Exploiting the available diversity from various sources in wireless networks is an easy way to improve performance at the expense of additional hardware, space, complexity and/or bandwidth. Signal space diversity (SSD) and cooperative communication are two promising techniques that exploit the available signal space and space diversity respectively. This study first presents symbol error rate (SER) analysis of an SSD system containing a single transmit antenna and N receive antennas with maximal-ratio combining (MRC) reception; thereafter it presents a simplified maximum-likelihood (ML) detection scheme for SSD systems, and finally presents the incorporation of SSD into a distributed switch and stay combining with partial relay selection (DSSC-PRS) system. Performance analysis of an SSD system containing a single transmit antenna and multiple receive antennas with MRC reception has been presented previously in the literature using the nearest neighbour (NN) approximation to the union bound, however results were not presented in closed form. Hence, closed form expressions are presented in this work. A new lower bound for the SER of an SSD system is also presented which is simpler to evaluate than the union bound/NN approximation and also simpler to use with other systems. The new lower bound is based on the minimum Euclidean distance of a rotated constellation and is termed the minimum distance lower bound (MDLB); it is also presented here in closed form. The presented bounds have been validated with simulation and found to be tight under certain conditions. The SSD scheme offers error performance and diversity benefits with the only penalty being an increase in detector complexity. Detection is performed in the ML sense and conventionally, all points in an M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) constellation are searched to find the transmitted symbol. Hence, a simplified detection scheme is proposed that only searches m symbols from M after performing initial signal conditioning. The simplified detection scheme is able to provide SER performance close to that of optimal ML detection in systems with multiple receive antennas. Cooperative communication systems can benefit from the error performance and diversity gains of the spectrally efficient SSD scheme since it requires no additional hardware, bandwidth or transmit power. Integrating SSD into a DSSC-PRS system has shown an improvement of approximately 5dB at an SER of 10-4 with a slight decrease in spectral efficiency at low SNR. Analysis has been performed using the newly derived MDLB and confirmed with simulation.