Combating synchronization errors in cooperative relays

Cooperative relays have recently been proposed and studied for mobile ad hoc networks. It has been shown that under perfect symbol synchronization, parallel relays with space-time modulation can yield more than 10 dB power savings over conventional serial relays in a highly mobile environment. We analyze the effect of synchronization errors on the performance of parallel relays, and also study several effective methods to reduce the negative impact of synch errors. Our study shows that when the synch errors are much smaller than a symbol interval, the performance of parallel relays deteriorates gracefully. We have also found that well designed space-time coding techniques, such as TR-STC and ST-OFDM, can be highly effective in combating large synch errors with only marginal reduction of data rate.