Iterative detection for zero-padded OFDM in non-regenerative cooperative wireless networks

Zero-Padding Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (ZP-OFDM) has recently been introduced to avoid coded-OFDM´s high decoding complexity. Various sub-optimal ZP-OFDM receivers have been developed in the literature to tradeoff performance with implementation complexity. In this paper, we propose a new iterative detection scheme for ZP-OFDM transmissions tailored to broadband cooperative networks with single relay and amplify-and-forward relaying. By avoiding channel dependent matrix inversion, which is inevitable in the case of minimum mean square error (MMSE)-ZP-OFDM transmissions, and incorporating linear processing techniques, we show that our proposed receiver is able to bring significant complexity reduction in the receiver design, while outperforming cooperative MMSE-ZP-OFDM.