Performance Evaluation of Soft Decode-and-Forward in Fading Relay Channels

In this paper, we analyze the block error rate (BLER) and bit error rate (BER) of soft decode-and-forward (SDF) using distributed Turbo codes, which is proposed recently to mitigate error propagation caused by decoding error in the relay node. Union bound (UB) in fading channels is derived and compared with simulation results. In order to get tight bounds for block fading case, limit-before-average technique is used. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to the space-time cooperation framework. The analysis and simulation show that the derived bound is very tight.