Correction of the CFO in OFDM Relay-Based Space-Time Codes

In this paper, we analyze the impact of carrier frequency offset (CFO) on the performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission employing space-frequency coding over relay channels. The challenge in such systems lies in the difficulty of canceling the interference resulting from the different CFOs that correspond to the relays involved in the transmission. We first analyze the CFO correction schemes and examine their impact on the achievable information rates. Further, we analyze the interference cancellation (IC) technique based on the so-called turbo-principle, that is, which jointly detects and decodes the received data. The increase of the rates achievable thanks to IC is assessed via parametric description of the iterative process. We provide examples that demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme and numerical results are contrasted with theoretical performance limits.