Distributive High-Rate Space–Frequency Codes Achieving Full Cooperative and Multipath Diversities for Asynchronous Cooperative Communications

In user-cooperative communications, relay nodes are usually asynchronous. By realizing that the processing in the frequency domain is insensitive to the errors in the time domain, Mei and Shin recently applied the space-time-coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technique to achieve full cooperative diversity for asynchronous cooperative communications, where orthogonal space-time block codes (particularly the Alamouti code) were used for relay nodes. In this paper, we consider asynchronous cooperative communications, and the channels from one node to another node are frequency-selective fading. We propose a high-rate space-frequency coding method and prove that it can achieve both cooperative and multipath diversities. Simulation results are shown to verify the performance of the constructed codes.