Performance analysis of soft-bit maximal ratio combining in cooperative relay networks

In digital cooperative relaying, signals from the source-destination and relay-destination links are combined at the destination to achieve spatial diversity. These signals may not necessarily belong to the same modulation scheme due to the varying channel qualities of the two links. Recently, we have proposed the "soft-bit maximum ratio combiner" (SBMRC) as a low complexity diversity combining scheme for signals with different modulation levels. SBMRC exhibits BER performance that is very close to the optimal maximum likelihood detector (MLD), but with much reduced complexity. In this paper, we revisit SBMRC and provide tight lower bound for the BER performance. Since SBMRC has BER performance slightly inferior to MLD, the derived lower bound can also be used as a good approximation for the BER performance of MLD.