Performance of relay assisted Turbo-VBLAST coded system for wireless communication

Abstract

A Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) relay assisted wireless communication system encoded with Turbo-VBLAST codes is studied in this paper. Source is equipped with multiple transmit antennas, relay is equipped with multiple transmit as well as receive antennas and destination is also equipped with multiple receive antennas. Input bits are encoded by a Turbo encoder and modulated by a QPSK or 16 QAM or 64 QAM modulator. VBLAST encoder is used to further encode the modulated symbols before transmission. It is observed that relay assisted Turbo-VBLAST coded system provides 3 to 7 dB gain for various number of transmit and receive antennas at a BER of 10 -5 compared to Turbo-VBALST encoded direct link system. It is also possible to get around 3 to 7 dB gain by increasing number of receive antennas at relay and destination from 2 to 6 for relay assisted Turbo-VBLAST coded system.