Exploiting cooperative multipath–Doppler diversity in relay-assisted high-speed train communications

Abstract

Severe doubly selective channel fading, or the time- and frequency-selective fading, prevailing in high-speed train (HST) communications, has been a critical issue that hinders the improvement of system efficiency and reliability. In this paper, a relay-assisted HST communication system is considered, and a low-complexity but effective scheme is proposed to cooperatively exploit the joint multipath–Doppler diversity of both the direct link and the relay link and thus to mitigate the negative effect of channel fading and improve the system reliability. In particular, using a special precoding structure followed by two-dimensional Fourier transform, the transmit signal is generated which in effect parallelizes the doubly selective fading channel. As a result, in the transform domain, pointwise combining and equalization, which are of linear complexity, become feasible and diversity gain is obtained. The maximal diversity order is then analyzed under the amplify-and-forward relay settings, which reveals that by cooperative relaying the joint multipath–Doppler diversity of both links can be well exploited. Simulation results verified our analysis.