Decoding techniques for coded full-rate cooperative systems

In this paper, we propose the use of bit-interleaved coded modulation iterative decoding (BICM-ID) in the full-rate decode and forward cooperative communication systems. At the destination, we exploit the interference signal to develop the optimal detector. It is shown that the proposed detector is implemented by parallel concatenating maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithms and dampers to the decoders. The detector exchanges soft information between decoders and MAP algorithms in an iterative way, thus, improving communication reliability. Due to the inevitable delay restriction of the optimal detector, a sub-optimal detector is developed. Extensive simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed detectors. Results indicate that the proposed detectors outperform conventional relaying detectors in terms of their bit error rate.