Detector design for half-duplex relay networks in ISI channels

Relay networks have attracted a lot of attention for their potential to increase spatial diversity. However, limited attention has been paid to practical detector design and implementation issues. In this paper, we investigate the design of maximum-likelihood detectors for half-duplex amplify-and-forward relay networks in intersymbol interference (ISI) channels. In particular, we study the case when the relay period is long, which results in an effective channel impulse response that is sparse and periodically time-varying. The proposed design provides a good performance/complexity tradeoff.