Exact Bit Error Probability of Cooperative Space-Time Block Coding with Amplify-and-Forward Strategy

Cooperative space-time coding (STC) is a distributed way to exploit the spatial diversity. With the help of relay nodes, STC can be applied among several single antenna users, where the relay nodes can either decode-and-forward (DF), or amplify-and-forward (AF) the received signal. In this paper, we analyze the performance of cooperative space-time block codes with AF strategy. Exact bit error probabilities (BEP) are derived in closed form for three existing protocols. We show that our exact BEP results are more reliable than the existing asymptotic results. A performance comparison of the three protocols is also provided.