Opportunistic Distributed Space-Time Coding for Decode-and-Forward Cooperation Systems

In this paper, we consider a decode-and-forward (DF) cooperation system consisting of two cooperative users in sending their information to a common destination, for which the distributed space-time coding (DSTC) is applied in an opportunistic manner, called opportunistic DSTC (O-DSTC), depending on whether the two users succeed in decoding each other´s information or not. We propose two O-DSTC schemes for the full-duplex and half-duplex relaying scenarios, which are, respectively, referred to as the full-duplex and half-duplex-based O-DSTC. We evaluate the outage performance of the proposed O-DSTC as well as the conventional selective DF (S-DF) cooperation and fixed DSTC (F-DSTC) schemes. Numerical results show that the O-DSTC outperforms the conventional S-DF and F-DSTC schemes considering both full-duplex and half-duplex. In addition, we develop the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) of the proposed O-DSTC, conventional S-DF and F-DSTC schemes by considering the two cooperative users with different data rates (also known as different multiplexing gains). We show that, for both the full-duplex and half-duplex modes, the proposed O-DSTC strictly outperforms the conventional S-DF and F-DSTC in terms of DMT. It is also shown that, in the full-duplex-based O-DSTC scheme, the diversity gain obtained by any of the two cooperative users not only depends on its own multiplexing gain, but also relates to its partner´s multiplexing gain. By jointly considering the two users´ DMT, the full-duplex-based O-DSTC scheme can achieve the optimal diversity gain when the two users are with the same multiplexing gain. For the half-duplex-based O-DSTC scheme, the DMT performance of the two users are independent of each other, which differs from the full-duplex-based O-DSTC scheme where mutual dependence exists between the cooperative users in terms of DMT.