Novel noncoherent detection for multi‐hop amplify‐and‐forward relaying systems

Abstract

Summary Because of the multiplication of fading gains and noise, the actual distributions of the received signals in multi‐hop amplify‐and‐forward relaying systems are no longer Gaussian. In this work, they are fitted with the t location‐scale distribution and the logistic distribution. Using these distributions, two novel noncoherent detectors are proposed based on the maximum likelihood method. Numerical results show that both new detectors outperform the conventional energy detector. The performance gain increases when the signal‐to‐noise ratio increases or when the hop number decreases. Importantly, the bit error rate of the conventional energy detector reaches an error floor while the bit error rates of the new detectors do not. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.