Distributed space-time coded non-orthogonal DF protocols with source antenna switching

In this paper, a new distributed space-time coded (DS-TCed) non-orthogonal decode-and-forward (NDF) protocol with source antenna switching (SAS) is proposed, where two antennas associated with each radio frequency chain can be alternatively used in the first and second phases. Several DSTC schemes for the NDF with SAS (NDF-SAS) protocol are proposed and their average pairwise error probability for the error-free source-relay (SR) channel is also derived. The simulation results show that the NDF-SAS protocol achieves larger diversity order than the NDF protocol under the error-free and erroneous SR channels.