Constellation Selection in Network Coded Distributive Antenna System

Relays can improve wireless links by providing an extra path to the direct path which together form a virtual multiple antenna system. Network Coded-Distributive Antenna System (NC-DAS) and Plain-Distributive Antenna System (PDAS) are examples of realizations of such scenario. Although the asymptotic diversity gain for both the schemes is comparable, the network coded scheme can further take advantage of the redundancy and the extra dimension provided by the relay link. This extra signal dimension can be very useful when multilevel modulation is employed as it gives the possibility for a better spread of the modulation signal points within the augmented signal space. This article presents a simple and effective Constellation Selection (CS) scheme for all the three links within the NC-DAS system. This selection procedure improves the bit error probability in both AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels. Two different detections schemes are considered in the paper. Joint detection where the both users are decoded simultaneously and detection with successive cancelation where the strongest user is detected first followed by cancelation and maximum ratio combining. Analytical expressions for the error probability supported by simulation results are presented. The obtained results show that constellation selection provides good performance gain as compared to the case of same constellation.