Minimizing the symbol-error-rate for amplify-and-forward relaying systems using evolutionary algorithms

In this paper, a new detector is proposed for an amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying system. The detector is designed to minimize the symbol-error-rate (SER) of the system. The SER surface is non-linear and may have multiple minimas, therefore, designing an SER detector for cooperative communications becomes an optimization problem. Evolutionary based algorithms have the capability to find the global minima, therefore, evolutionary algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO) and differential evolution (DE) are exploited to solve this optimization problem. The performance of proposed detectors is compared with the conventional detectors such as maximum likelihood (ML) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) detector. In the simulation results, it can be observed that the SER performance of the proposed detectors is less than 2 dB away from the ML detector. Significant improvement in SER performance is also observed when comparing with the MMSE detector. The computational complexity of the proposed detector is much less than the ML and MMSE algorithms. Moreover, in contrast to ML and MMSE detectors, the computational complexity of the proposed detectors increases linearly with respect to the number of relays.