Distributed differential space-time coding for wireless relay networks

Distributed space-time coding is a cooperative transmission scheme for wireless relay networks. With this scheme, antennas of the distributive relays work as transmit antennas of the sender and generate a space-time code at the receiver. It achieves the maximum diversity. Although the scheme needs no channel information at relays, it does require full channel information, both the channels from the transmitter to relays and the channels from relays to the receiver, at the receiver. In this paper, we propose a differential transmission scheme, which requires channel information at neither relays nor the receiver, for wireless relay networks. As distributed space-time coding can be seen as the counterpart of space-time coding in the network setting, this scheme is the counterpart of differential space-time coding. Compared to coherent distributed space-time coding, the differential scheme is 3dB worse. In addition, we show that Alamouti, square real orthogonal, and Sp(2) codes can be used differentially in networks with corresponding numbers of relays. We also propose distributed differential space-time codes that work for networks with any number of relays using circulant matrices.