On the design of delay-tolerant distributed space-time codes with minimum length

The construction of distributed space-time codes for asynchronous relays is considered. A novel algebraic structure is proposed and shown to achieve full diversity for arbitrary number of relays, arbitrary input alphabets, and arbitrary delay profiles among the relays. Unlike previously proposed delay tolerant schemes, the new design has minimum length which translates into smaller decoding complexity at the same transmission rate. Full-rate and full-diversity are achieved by the new designs with or without the use of guard intervals between successive transmissions. Simulation results confirm the mathematical analysis of the proposed codes.