Distributed space-time coding scheme with differential detection and power allocation for cooperative relay network

By introducing orthogonal space-time coding (STC) scheme in wireless cooperative relay network, two distributed differential STC (DSTC) schemes based on the amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) methods are, respectively, developed. The scheme performance is investigated in symmetric and asymmetric wireless relay networks. The presented schemes require no channel information at both relay terminals and destination terminal, and have linear decoding complexity when compared with the existing scheme. Moreover, they are suitable for the application of different constellation modulations and DSTC schemes, and thus provide more freedoms of design. Besides, the power allocations between source and relay terminals are jointly optimized to minimize the system pairwise error probability for symmetric and asymmetric networks, and two practical methods are presented to solve the complicated optimized problem from asymmetric network. Simulation results show that the scheme with DF method has better performance than that with AF method due to no amplification of noise power, but the performance superiority will decrease at high SNR due to the error propagation of decoding at the relays. Furthermore, the distributed DSTC schemes with optimal power allocation have better performance than those with conventional fixed power allocation.