A novel Quantize-and-Forward cooperative system: Channel parameter estimation techniques

The Quantize and Forward cooperative communication protocol improves the reliability of data transmission by allowing a relay to forward to the destination a quantized version of the signal received from the source. In prior studies of the Quantize and Forward protocol, all channel parameters are assumed to be perfectly known at the destination, while in reality these need to be estimated. This paper proposes a novel Quantize and Forward protocol in which the relay compensates for the rotation on the source-relay channel using a crude channel estimate, before quantizing the phase of the received M-PSK data symbols. Therefore, as far as the source-relay channel is concerned, only an SNR estimate is needed at the destination. Further, the destination applies the EM algorithm to improve the estimates of the source-destination and relay-destination channels. The resulting performance is shown to be close to that of a system with known channel parameters.