Performance of an asymmetric and asynchronous decode-and-forward FBMC relay system

End-to-end link performance of an asymmetric and asynchronous dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relay system built up using a causal multirate filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) technique operated under Rayleigh fading is presented. Three main performance measures namely bit error rate (BER), outage probability and channel capacity are used for this evaluation and approximate closed-form expressions for them are also made available. FBMC setup is modeled in exact form without any approximations while customizing to one of the most efficient subcarrier filter. Simulations are carried out in quasi-static multipath fading channels under symmetric, asymmetric, synchronous and asynchronous conditions where a minimum distance based receiver is employed for the symbol recovery. Performance characteristics are identified under different noise, interference, channel and synchronization conditions.