Channel Estimation and Performance of Mismatched Decoding in Wireless Relay Networks

This paper proposes a novel power allocation among the source and relays of wireless relay networks to minimize the mean-square error of the channel estimation when distributed space-time coding (DSTC) is applied. Both the maximum likelihood (ML) and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimations are considered. The impact of imperfect channel estimation on the error performance of DSTC is also analyzed, where it is proved that the mismatched decoding of DSTC is able to achieve the same diversity order as the coherent decoding of DSTC. Furthermore, when the optimal power allocation obtained in the training phase is applied to the transmission phase, the mismatched decoding is able to achieve the maximum diversity order as the coherent decoding.