Differential Space-Time Network Coding for Multi-Source Cooperative Communications

Due to the asynchronous nature of cooperative communications, simultaneous transmissions from two or more nodes are challenging in practice. The existing cooperative communications employing successive transmission from one user node to the other can avoid the synchronization problem but results in large transmission delay. In addition, channel estimation in multi-source cooperative communications is a challenging and costly task due to the amount of training, especially when the number of cooperative users is large. Considering these practical challenges in multi-source cooperative communications, this paper proposes a differential space-time network coding (DSTNC) scheme for narrowband multi-source cooperative communications to overcome the problems of imperfect synchronization and complex channel estimation without introducing large transmission delay. Each user in the network linearly combines the correctly decoded symbols via network coding and transmits its packet in time division multiple access (TDMA) mode. The pairwise error probability is analyzed and the design criteria of the DSTNC are derived to achieve full diversity. For broadband cooperative communications, distributed differential space-time-frequency network coding (DSTFNC), which is differentially encoded within each orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) block, is designed through mapping from the proposed DSTNC. When the statistical channel power-delay profile is known at the corresponding user node, each node can permutate its channel independently to improve the performance of the DSTFNC scheme. Simulation results are presented to verify the performance of the proposed schemes.