In this thesis, a novel iterative receiver and its improved version are proposed for
relay-assisted multiuser communications, in which multiple users transmit to a destination
with the help of a relay and using fast frequency-hopping modulation. Each
user employs a channel encoder to protect its information and facilitate interference
cancellation at the receiver. The signal received at the relay is either amplified, or
partially decoded with a simple energy detector, before being forwarded to the destination.
Under flat Rayleigh fading channels, the receiver at the destination can
be implemented non-coherently, i.e., it does not require the instantaneous channel
information to demodulate the users’ transmitted signals. The proposed iterative
algorithm at the destination exploits the soft outputs of the channel decoders to
successively extract the maximum likelihood symbols of the users and perform interference
cancellation. The iterative method is successfully applied for both cases of
amplify-and-forward and partial decode-and-forward relaying. The error performance
of the proposed iterative receiver is investigated by computer simulation. Under the
same spectral efficiency, simulation results demonstrate the excellent performance of
the proposed receiver when compared to the performance of decoding without interference
cancellation as well as the performance of the maximum likelihood multiuser
detection previously developed for uncoded transmission. Simulation results also suggest
that a proper selection of channel coding schemes can help to support significant
more users without consuming extra system resources.
In addition, to further enhance the receiver’s performance in terms of the bit error
rate, an improved version of the iterative receiver is presented. Such an improved receiver
invokes inner-loop iterations between the channel decoders and the demappers
in such a way that the soft outputs of the channel decoders are also used to refine the
outputs of the demappers for every outer-loop iteration. Simulation results indicate
a performance gain of about 2.5dB by using the two-loop receiver when compared to
the performance of the first proposed receiver
