Ant-Colony Based Near-ML Block Decoder in Asynchronous Cooperative MIMO Systems Using a Linear Dispersion Structure

The linear dispersion structure is employed to accommodate the dynamic topology of cooperative networks, as well as to achieve higher throughput than conventional space-time codes based on orthogonal designs. Asynchronous Cooperative Liner Dispersion Codes (ACLDC) are applied to achieve full diversity in the presence of asynchronous reception. To achieve a near ML performance with much lower decoding complexity, we present an Ant-Colony Optimization (ACO) based decoder. We demonstrate that the proposed decoder is able to provide the system with a near-ML performance at a significantly reduced complexity.