Space time coding with estimate and forward strategy in cooperative wireless communication systems

Space-time coding (STC) applied for multiple antenna systems has proved very important in attaining better diversity and multiplexing gains. Recently, virtual antenna system is emerging as a solution for spatially constrained wireless terminals to compensate for the lost benefit from the incapability of multiple antenna installation. Distributed space-time coding (DSTC) is the STC counterpart applied for wireless relay systems. In this paper, DSTC is applied for estimate and forward relaying strategy. The analysis shows that it attains better pairwise error probability (PEP) compared to amplify-and-forward (AF) based DSTC. In addition, the scheme is more responsive to determinant change of the code word difference matrix as the PEP upper bound with lowest singular value shows. As a result, compared to the AF based DSTC, better coding gain is obtained.