Linear Transceiver Design for Nonorthogonal Amplify-and-Forward Protocol Using a Bit Error Rate Criterion

The ever growing demand of higher data rates can now be addressed by exploiting cooperative diversity. This form of diversity has become a fundamental technique for achieving spatial diversity by exploiting the presence of idle users in the
network. This has led to new challenges in terms of designing new protocols and detectors for cooperative communications. Among various amplify-and-forward (AF) protocols, the half duplex nonorthogonal amplify-and-forward (NAF) protocol is superior to other AF schemes in terms of error performance and capacity. However, this superiority is achieved at the cost of higher receiver complexity. Furthermore, in order to exploit the full diversity of the system an optimal precoder is required. In this paper, an optimal joint linear transceiver is proposed for the NAF protocol. This transceiver operates on the principles of minimum bit error rate (BER), and is referred as joint bit error rate (JBER) detector. The BER performance of JBER detector is superior to all the proposed linear detectors such as channel inversion, the maximal ratio combining, the biased maximum likelihood detectors, and the minimum mean square error. The proposed transceiver also outperforms previous precoders designed for the NAF protocol.