The performance of uplink LDPC‐coded multirelay cooperation based on virtual V‐BLAST processing

This paper proposes an efficient uplink low‐density parity‐check (LDPC)‐coded multirelay cooperation architecture based on virtual Vertical‐Bell Labs Layered Space–Time (V‐BLAST) processing over a Rayleigh fading channel, where minimum mean square error in combination with a successive interference canceller and belief propagation‐based joint iterative decoder based on the introduced multilayer Tanner graph are effectively designed to detect and decode the corrupted received sequence at the destination. By introducing V‐BLAST transmission to coded multirelay cooperation, relays send their symbol streams simultaneously, which significantly reduce the transmission delay and provide higher transmission efficiency. The theoretical analysis and numerical results show that the proposed LDPC‐coded cooperation scheme outperforms the coded noncooperation under the same code rate and achieves a better compromise, with respect to the performance, signal delay, and encoding complexity associated to the number of relays, than the conventional LDPC‐coded cooperations without V‐BLAST transmission. This performance gain can be credited to the proposed V‐BLAST processing architecture and belief propagation‐based joint iterative decoding by the introduced multilayer Tanner graph at a receiver side. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.