Performance Analysis for a Suboptimum ML Receiver in Decode-and-Forward Communications

In this paper, a closed-form bit-error-rate (BER) performance analysis is presented for a suboptimum maximum- likelihood (ML) receiver in decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative wireless communications. The suboptimum ML receiver assumes that an average probability of decoding error at the relay is available at the destination, which depends only on the variance of the source-relay channel link. A by-product of the analysis is that we can obtain a BER analytical result for the DF cooperative protocol using an equal-gain-combining receiver at the destination. Simulation results are presented to validate the theoretical analvsis.