Maximum a posteriori channel estimation for cooperative diversity orthogonal frequencydivision multiplexing systems in amplify-andforward mode

Transmit diversity-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems have been proposed to mitigate the detrimental effects of channel fading. However, owing to the space and power limitations, the use of multiple transmit antennas is not practical in certain wireless devices, such as portable terminals and wireless sensors. Therefore cooperation among users at the physical layer has been proposed recently. Here, space-time block coded in amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying mode has been proposed as cooperative diversity for OFDM systems (CO-OFDM) in the presence of perfect channel-state information. Then, the channel estimation techniques for CO-OFDM systems in AF mode based on pilot symbols are investigated over frequency-selective channels. In particular, expectation-maximisation (EM) based maximum a posteriori (MAP) channel estimation is developed and compared with comp-type pilot-aided channel estimation (PACE) based the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator and the least minimum mean-square error (LMMSE) channel estimation techniques for CO-OFDM systems. To overcome the drawback owing to the receiver complexity, the Karhunen-Loeve expansion with the optimal truncation property is also considered. Simulation results that demonstrate the overall performance advantage of the EM-MAP based receiver over the PACE-ML and PACE-LMMSE based receivers are presented.