Performance analysis of decode-and-forward relaying in impulsive noise environments

A performance analysis of both centralized and decentralized cooperation diversity schemes involving decode-and-forward relay nodes is carried out in the case of Middleton Class A impulsive disturbance. It is shown that, with respect to the Gaussian noise case, the presence of impulsive disturbance does not significantly affect the performance of the maximum-likelihood detector in terms of coding gain and asymptotic diversity order. Instead, the major effect of the impulse disturbance is on the finite signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) diversity order, which does not monotonously increase as the SNR rises. Numerical results are provided to validate the derived theoretical results.