Abstract

The objective of this study was to derive approximate closed-form error rates for M-ary burst symbol transmission (MBST) of dual-hop 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, our focus was on ADF relay systems' error-events at relay nodes. Each event's occurrence probability and probability density function (PDF) were then derived. With error-event based approach, we derived a tractable form of PDF for combined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Averaged error rates were then derived as approximate expressions for arbitrary link SNR with different modulation orders and numbers of relays. Its accuracy was verified by comparison with simulation results.