Relay Selection Based Double-Differential Transmission for Cooperative Networks with Multiple Carrier Frequency Offsets: Model, Analysis, and Optimization

Due to the distributed nature, cooperative networks are generally subject to multiple carrier frequency offsets (MCFOs), which make the channels time-varying and drastically degrade the system performance. In this paper, to address the MCFOs problem in detect-andforward (DetF) multi-relay cooperative networks, a robust relay selection (RS) based double-differential (DD) transmission scheme, termed RSDDT, is proposed, where the best relay is selected to forward the source's double-differentially modulated signals to the destination with the DetF protocol. The proposed RSDDT scheme can achieve excellent performance over fading channels in the presence of unknown MCFOs. Considering double-differential multiple phase-shift keying (DDMPSK) is applied, we first derive exact expressions for the outage probability and average bit error rate (BER) of the RSDDT scheme. Then, we look into the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime and present simple and informative asymptotic outage probability and average BER expressions, which reveal that the proposed scheme can achieve full diversity. Moreover, to further improve the BER performance of the RSDDT scheme, we investigate the optimum power allocation strategy among the source and the relay nodes, and simple analytical solutions are obtained. Numerical results are provided to corroborate the derived analytical expressions and it is demonstrated that the proposed optimum power allocation strategy offers substantial BER performance improvement over the equal power allocation strategy.