Cooperative Balanced Space-Time Block Codes for Relay Networks

In this paper, a novel coding method for cooperative relay networks is proposed, which guarantees full diversity for any number of mobile relays with minimal delay, provided that few bits of feedback from the destination to the source and relays are available. As in the case of orthogonal space-time block codes, all transmitted symbols are separately decoded both in the relays and the destination. So, decoding complexity grows linearly. Many of the proposed solutions in the literature are distributed space-time codes which are designed limited number of relays. The proposed scheme has better signal-to-noise ratio improvement with respect to relay selection scheme for N relays present in the wireless system. Moreover, it requires minimal amount of delay. Lastly, the new method satisfies power consumption fairness among relay terminals and requires no knowledge of topology information.