Performance Analysis of the Optimum Receiver for Decode and Forward Relaying

Cooperative communication through decode and forward (DF) relaying is an effective solution for mitigating channel fading in wireless systems. We consider a cooperative diversity system having a source, a relay, and a destination. The source and the relay cooperate through the DF protocol to enable the transmission of a binary phase-shift keying symbol in a flat Rayleigh fading environment. The optimum receiver for this system is presented, and, from the decision rule, the end-to-end symbol error probability (SEP) is analyzed. Numerical results on the SEP are obtained and compared with those for a suboptimum receiver which does not need the channel state information of the source to relay link.