Differential dual-hop relaying over time-varying Rayleigh-fading channels

This paper studies dual-hop amplify-and-forward relaying over time-varying Rayleigh fading channels with differential M-PSK modulation and non-coherent detection. For the case of “two-symbol” detection, a first order time-series model is utilized to characterize the time-varying nature of the cascaded channel. Based on this model, an exact bit error rate (BER) expression is derived and confirmed with simulation results. The obtained expression shows that the BER is related to the auto-correlation of the cascaded channel and an irreducible error floor exists at high transmit power. To overcome the error floor experienced with fast-fading, a nearly optimal “multiple-symbol” differential sphere detection (MSDSD) is also developed. The error performance of MSDSD is illustrated with simulation results under different fading scenarios.