Blind timing and carrier synchronization in decode and forward cooperative systems

Synchronization in Decode and Forward (DF) cooperative communication systems is a complex and challenging task requiring estimation of many independent timing and carrier offsets at each relay in the broadcasting phase and multiple timing and carrier offsets at the destination in the relaying phase. This paper presents a scheme for blind channel, timing and carrier offset estimation in a DF cooperative system with one source, M relays and one destination equipped with N antennas. In particular, we exploit blind source separation at the destination to convert the difficult problem of jointly estimating multiple synchronization parameters in the relaying phase into more tractable sub-problems of estimating many individual timing and carrier offsets for the independent relays. We also modify and propose a criteria for best relay selection at the destination. Simulation results demonstrate the excellent end-to-end Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of the proposed blind scheme with relay selection, which is shown to achieve the maximum diversity order with M = 4 relays using N = 5 antennas at the destination. The presented work is a complete solution to blind synchronization and channel estimation in DF cooperative communication systems.