Capacity enhancement of half-duplex multi-relay system in impulsive noise environment

In this paper, we study two-hop communication protocol in presence of Additive Class-A impulsive noise, where relay nodes assist in the communication between two terminals. The terminals operate in half-duplex mode; hence the transmission of one information symbol from the source terminal to the destination terminal occupies two time slots. This leads to a loss in spectral efficiency due to the per-log factor one-half in corresponding capacity expressions. We propose to extend the two-path protocol to the case of multi-relay networks using decode-and-forward scheme. This relay protocol avoids the pre-log factor one-half. The communication channels between source and relays and between the relays and destination are assumed to be Rayleigh flat fading. The performance of the network is investigated in presence of the impulsive noise for perfect and estimated channel. The performance is measured in terms of bit error rate. Moreover, the outage probability is evaluated when one relay is used, and it is compared with the one for the multi-relay system. Channel estimation is performed using least square algorithm. The performance of the channel estimation algorithm is measured in terms of the mean square error of estimation.