Noncoherent Low-Decoding-Complexity Space-Time Codes for Wireless Relay Networks

The differential encoding/decoding setup introduced by Kiran et al, Oggier et al and Jing et al for wireless relay networks that use codebooks consisting of unitary matrices is extended to allow codebooks consisting of scaled unitary matrices. For such codebooks to be used in the Jing-Hassibi protocol for cooperative diversity, the conditions that need to be satisfied by the relay matrices and the codebook are identified. A class of previously known rate one, full diversity, four-group encodable and four-group decodable differential space-time codes (DSTCs) is proposed for use as distributed DSTCs (DDSTCs) in the proposed set up. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first known low decoding complexity DDSTC scheme for cooperative wireless networks.