Non-Coherent Cooperative Communications Dispensing with Channel Estimation Relying on Erasure Insertion Aided Reed-Solomon Coded SFH M-ary FSK Subjected to Partial-Band Interference and Rayleigh Fading

The rationale of our design is that although much of the literature of cooperative systems assumes perfect coherent detection, the assumption of having any channel estimates at the relays imposes an unreasonable burden on the relay station. Hence, non-coherently detected Reed-Solomon (ReS) coded Slow Frequency Hopping (SFH) assisted M-ary Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) is proposed for cooperative wireless networks, subjected to both partial-band interference and Rayleigh fading. Erasure insertion (EI) assisted ReS decoding based on the joint maximum output-ratio threshold test (MO-RTT) is investigated in order to evaluate the attainable system performance. Compared to the conventional error-correction-only decoder, the EI scheme may achieve an E_b/N_0 gain of approximately 3 dB at the Codeword Error Probability, P_w, of 10^{-4}, when employing the ReS(31,20) code combined with 32-FSK modulation. Additionally, we evaluated the system's performance, when either equal gain combining (EGC) or selection combining (SC) techniques are employed at the destination's receiver. The results demonstrated that in the presence of one and two assisting relays, the EGC scheme achieves gains of 1.5 dB and 1.0 dB at the P_w of 10^{-6}, respectively, compared to the SC arrangement. Furthermore, we demonstrated that for the same coding rate and packet size, the ReS(31,20) code using EI decoding is capable of outperforming convolutional coding, when 32-FSK modulation is considered, whilst LDPC coding had an edge over the above two schemes.