Exploiting cooperative multipath –Doppler diversity in relay-assisted high-speed train communications

Severe doubly selective channel fading, or the time- and frequency-selective fading, prevailing in high- speed train （HST） communications, has been a critical issue that hinders the improvement of system efficiency and reli- ability. In this paper, a relay-assisted HST communication system is considered, and a low-complexity but effective scheme is proposed to cooperatively exploit the joint mul- tipath-Doppler diversity of both the direct link and the relay link and thus to mitigate the negative effect of channel fading and improve the system reliability. In particular, using a special precoding structure followed by two-dimensional Fourier transform, the transmit signal is generated which in effect parallelizes the doubly selective fading channel. As a result, in the transform domain, pointwise combining and equalization, which are of linear complexity, become feasi- ble and diversity gain is obtained. The maximal diversity order is then analyzed under the amplify-and-forward relay settings, which reveals that by cooperative relaying the joint multipath-Doppler diversity of both links can be well exploited. Simulation results verified our analysis.