Abstract

In this paper, we derive the outage probability for M-ary phase shifting keying (MPSK) and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) burst transmission (BT) of adaptive decode-and-forward (ADF) cooperative relay systems over quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels. Within a burst, there are pilot symbols and data symbols. Pilot symbols are used for channel estimation schemes and each relay node’s transmission mode selection schemes. At first, we focus on ADF relay systems in which the probability density function (PDF) is derived on the basis of error events at relay nodes corresponding to channel estimation errors. Next, the average outage probability is derived as an approximate expression for an arbitrary link signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for different modulation orders. Its accuracy is demonstrated by comparison with simulation results. Further, it is confirmed that BT-ADF relay systems with pilot symbol based channel estimation schemes enables to select correctly decoded relay nodes without additional signaling between relay nodes and the destination node, and it is verified that the ideal performance is achieved with small SNR loss.