Channel estimation for amplify-and-forward relaying: cascaded against disintegrated estimators

The authors investigate the performance of amplify-and-forward relaying with two different pilot-symbol-assisted channel estimation methods. In the first estimation method, the cascaded channel consisting of source-to-relay and relay-to-destination links is estimated at the destination terminal. No channel estimator is required at the relay terminal. In the second estimation method, the estimation of cascaded channel is disintegrated into separate estimations of source-to-relay and relay-to-destination links which are carried out at the relay and the destination terminals, respectively. The latter method involves feed-forwarding a quantised version of the source-to-relay channel estimate to the destination terminal. Through the derivation of mean squared error (MSE) diversity gain analysis and Monte-Carlo simulations, the authors investigate the performance of amplify-and-forward relaying with these channel estimation methods. Our results demonstrate that full diversity can be achieved in the presence of channel estimation. The authors further show that cascaded channel estimator outperforms its competitor with a small number of quantisation bits. As the number of employed quantisation bits increase, disintegrated channel estimator approaches to its competitor eventually outperforming it.