Performance evaluation of STTCs for virtual antenna arrays

The work analyses the link level performance of a VAA system with deployed space-time trellis codes (STTCs). STTCs offer a high coding and diversity gain with an increasing number of transitional states and transmit and receive antennas. It is shown that STTCs can be deployed with VAA and that they yield promising link performance gains as to justify the increased complexity required for relaying. Due to the spatially separated relaying mobile terminals, no correlation appears among the members of a VAA, which explains the superior performance. Simulations could show that the double noise and concatenated wireless channels do not degrade the performance of STTCs significantly. The STTC coefficient design criteria, communication scenario and the channel conditions. Since the deployment of VAA emulates a MIMO channel with a high number of receive antenna, the trace criterion is the optimum criterion to construct slow fading codes. It is further shown that the determinant code design criterion does not depend on the statistics of the fading channel.