A differential cooperative transmission scheme with low rate feedback

The use of cooperative schemes in wireless networks has recently attracted much attention in scenarios where application of multiple-antenna systems is impractical. In such scenarios, the requirement of having full channel state information (CSI) at the receiver side can be relaxed by using differential distributed (DD) transmission schemes. However, in the DD schemes proposed so far, the decoding complexity as well as the delay requirements increase with the number of relays. In this paper, we propose a low-rate feedback-based DD approach (with one-bit feedback per relay) that enjoys full diversity, linear maximum likelihood (ML) decoding complexity, and unrestrictive delay requirements. In addition, the proposed feedback scheme does not require any CSI knowledge at the receiver, and its implementation is simple. Computer simulations demonstrate substantial performance improvements of the proposed techniques as compared to several popular cooperative transmission schemes.