AbstractIn this paper, we propose a new simple relaying strategy based on bit-interleaved convolutionally coded star quadrature amplitude

modulation (QAM) along with coherent/ no coherent detection. Star-QAM is composed of multiple concentric circles of phase-shift keying (PSK). Exploiting this property, a hard limiter is used to enhance power amplifier (PA) efficiency at the relay. Moreover, we show that the proposed approach retains differential detectability, which results in a significant reduction of receiver complexity with robustness against phase ambiguity. By analyzing our proposed cooperation with coherent/non coherent detection in terms of asymptotic pairwise error probability (PEP), we show that the full diversity order can be achieved on the condition that the minimum free distance of the convolutional codes is larger than the predetermined value specified by the number of available relays. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of PA efficiency is confirmed by comparing the statistical distributions of the corresponding instantaneous signal powers. All the theoretical results agree with those obtained by computer simulations.

Non-regenerative cooperation such as amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying has been actively studied due to their simplicity in the literature [5, 6]. Compared with regenerative cooperation such as decode-and-forward (DF) relaying [5],neither demodulation nor decoding is needed at the relay in AF relaying since the relay only re-transmits the scaled or amplified version of the received signals. However, in AF relaying, the output signals at the relay have a high instantaneous power compared with those of DF relaying mainly because of its noise enhancement nature [7]. The power amplifier (PA) typically exhibits nonlinear characteristics as the signal input power approaches its saturation region, and this nonlinear amplification not only causes in-band distortion but also produces out-of-band radiation which results in the adjacent channel interference (ACI). Hence, in order to avoid such a nonlinear distortion effect, the PA should operate with a large input back-off (IBO), which significantly degrades PA efficiency. Therefore, AF relaying is no longer favorable from the viewpoint of PA efficiency compared to DF relaying, and thus DF relaying can be considered as preferable for practical implementation [7]. In order to further reduce the complexity at the relay, the use of detect-and-forward (DetF) is an effective alternative since the detection is only needed at the relay [8]. However, when the source employs a higher order modulation such as square shaped quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) in order to increase the

bandwidth efficiency, the relay again suffers from a higher instantaneous power because of its amplitude variation even with DetF relaying [9]. To overcome this issue, the peak power reducing constellation shaping [10] can be employed at either the source or the relay. This technique, however, requires additional complexity and thus leads to additional power consumption at the transmitter side.

Relay channels and their extensions form the basis for our study of cooperative diversity. Because relaying and cooperative diversity essentially create a virtual antenna array, work on multiple-antenna systems, or multiple-input, multiple output (MIMO) systems, is of course relevant, as are different ways of characterizing fundamental performance limits in wireless channels, in particular outage probability for non ergodic Settings. [29][32] examines multiple-access channels with generalized feedback. Here, the generalized feedback allows the sources to essentially act as relays for one another. This model relates most closely to the wireless channels we have in mind. The constructions in [28][30] can be viewed as two-terminal generalizations of the cooperation scheme in [5]; the construction [27] may be viewed as a two-terminal generalization of the observation scheme in [5]. Sendonaris et al. introduce multipath fading into the model of [28], [30], calling their approaches for this system model user cooperation diversity [6], [33], [34]. For ergodic fading, they illustrate that the adapted coding scheme of [30] enlarges the achievable rate region. 1) Relay Channels: The classical relay channel models a class of threeterminal communication channels originally examined by van der Meulen [12], [13]. Cover and El Gamal [5] treat certain discrete memoryless and additive white Gaussian noise relay channels, and they determine channel capacity for the class of physically degraded1 relay channels. More generally, they develop lower bounds on capacity, i.e., achievable rates, via three structurally different random coding schemes: facilitation [5, Theorem 2], in which the relay does not actively help the source, but rather, facilitates the source transmission by inducing as little interference as possible; cooperation [5, Theorem 1], in which the relay fully decodes the source message and retransmits, jointly with the source, a bin index (in the sense of SlepianWolf coding [14], [15]) of the previous source message;

 observation2 [5, Theorem 6], in which the relay encodes a quantized version of its received signal, using ideas from source coding with side information [14], [16], [17]. Loosely speaking, cooperation yields highest achievable rates when the source-relay channel quality is very high, and observation yields highest achievable rates when the relay-destination channel quality is very high. Various extensions to the case of multiple relays have appeared in the work of Schein and Gallager [18], [19], Gupta and Kumar [20], [21], Gastpar et al.[22][24], and Reznik et al. [25]. For channels with multiple information sources, Kramer and Wijngaarden [26] consider a multipleaccess channel in which the sources communicate to a single destination and share a single relay. 2) Multiple-Access Channels With Generalized Feedback: Work by King [27], Carleial [28], and Willems et al.