Experimental Verification of PER Performance of STBC-Based Multi-Hop Cooperative Relaying

In this paper, the end-to-end packet error rate (PER) performance of a space-time block code (STBC) based multi-hop cooperative relaying system is discussed. This system consists of a source, a destination, and two STBC based cooperative relays in each hop. These relays decode their received packets and forward the packets only when no error is found. In this system, there are conditions where the end-to-end PER performance improves with the number of hops. The theoretical end-to-end PER performance of this system have been derived analytically. However, in real-world wireless systems, various practical issues, e.g., timing synchronization and imperfect channel estimation, have a large impact on the performance. To confirm the end-to-end PER performance of this system in actual setup, an in-lab experiment using a fading emulator and four transceivers is performed under Rayleigh fading environment. The experimental results clarify the PER performance of the STBC based multi-hop cooperative relaying system. In addition, the theoretical PER performance is also verified from the experimental results.