Amplify-and-Forward Relaying Aided Reed-Solomon Coded Hybrid-ARQ Relying on Realistic Channel Estimation

Channel estimation (CE) plays an important role in determining the achievable performance of coherently detected communications systems. In this paper, the impact of imperfect CE on Reed-Solomon coded Hybrid Automatic-Repeat-Request (ReS/H-ARQ) systems is investigated for transmission over correlated Rayleigh fading channels. The proposed scheme invokes Amplify-and-Forward relaying, where the benefits of multiple cooperative stations are also quantified. Both the corresponding bit error probability and goodput are characterized. The system parameters are adjusted for maximizing the attainable system performance. An optimum pilot power allocation scheme is proposed, which reduces the required bit-energy by 4 dB for the (255/223) Reed-Solomon code defined over the Galois field GF (256) without reducing the goodput