Distributed orthogonal STBC for amplify and forward cooperative network under imperfect synchronization

Most research dealing with the issue of imperfect synchronization in D-STBC cooperative networks assume that all relay nodes receive the symbols correctly while employing a decode and forward (DF) relaying protocol. It is an unrealistic assumption as detection errors at the relay nodes are inevitable. In this paper this assumption will be relaxed, and an amplify and forward (AF) protocol is used. To achieve a low complexity yet effective receiver the paper proposes a modified version of a successive interference cancellation (SIC) detector to combat the synchronization errors induced by imperfections. Our numerical simulations show that the SIC detector can mitigate the performance system degradation in just a small number of iterations.