Single-carrier frequency-domain equalization for multi-relay cooperative systems with relay selection

In this paper, we investigate the performance of single-carrier frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE) for distributed space-time block coded (DSTBC) systems with Non-Regenerative (or amplify-and-forward) relaying over frequency-selective Rician fading channels. Our performance analysis demonstrates that SC-FDE for DSTBC is able to achieve a maximum diversity order of Σ_i=1^R min (L(SR_i), L(R_iD)) + R, where R is the number of relays, L(SR_i) and L(R_iD) are the channel memory lengths for source to i^th relay (S → R_i) link and i^th relay to destination (R_t → D) link, respectively. Furthermore, to overcome the loss in bandwidth efficiency due to the deployment of orthogonal DSTBC, we present and investigate several relay selection strategies for D-SC-FDE over frequency selective channels.