Design of a maximum-likelihood detector for cooperative communications in intersymbol interference channels

摘要

Recently, cooperative communication has attracted a lot of attention for its potential to increase spatial diversity. However, limited attention has been paid to the physical layer and implementation issues. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of building optimal detectors for cooperative communications in intersymbol interference channels. A novel system model with the amplify-and-forward half-duplex relay is first introduced. Subsequently, we propose an optimal detector for receiver design which can be realized with a whitening filter and maximum likelihood sequence estimator (MLSE) based on the Viterbi algorithm. The implementation of the proposed detector is discussed, and its complexity is analyzed based on an FPGA implementation result. Numerical simulations demonstrating the performance of the detector are provided.