Novel half-coherent receivers for amplify-and-forward relaying

Consider a system in which the signal is transmitted from the source to the destination via an amplify-and-forward relay. For such a system, we derive in this paper, novel receivers that have complete knowledge of either the source-relay link or the relay-destination link. These receivers are termed as, ‘half-coherent receivers’ as they have channel-state-information (CSI) of only one of two links. These receivers can be very useful in a system in which only the relay can afford high complexity by having a channel estimation module and the destination is unable to support channel estimation or a system in which only the destination can afford higher complexity and includes the channel estimation module. The analytical bit-error-rate (BER) performances of the proposed receivers are derived for Rician fading. Numerical results show considerable performance gains of the new receivers, especially at low signal-to-noise ratio.