BER performance analysis of a Cooperative BICM system based on post-BSC model

A generic cooperative BICM system is described and an analytical model capturing relay error through a binary symmetric channel (BSC) is presented. The analytical model is called Post-BSC model as the BSC channel is placed after encoder of the relay node. Tight BER upper bound is derived for the presented model and close match between simulation and analysis for the presented model is observed. However it is also observed that the proposed model is optimistic and fails to effectively model the original system at low SNR conditions of the source to relay link. Despite this fact the incorporation of the Post-BSC model based maximum likelihood decoding greatly improves the system BER with respect to the original DF scheme.