Tight lower bound of optimal non-coherent detection for FSK modulated AF cooperative communications in Rayleigh fading channels

When wireless channels undergo fast fading, non-coherent frequency shift keying (FSK) (de)modulation schemes may be considered for amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative communications. In this paper, we derive the bit-error-rate performance of partial non-coherent receiver as a lower bound of the optimal non-coherent receiver for FSK modulated AF cooperative communications. From the simulation and analytical results, it is found that the derived lower bound is very closed to simulation results. This result shows that knowing partial channel state information may not improve system performance significantly. On the other hand, conventional optimal non-coherent receiver involves complicated integration operation. To address the above complexity issue, we also propose a near optimal non-coherent receiver which does not involve integration operation. Simulation results have shown that the performance gap between the proposed near optimal receiver and the optimal receiver is small.