The Impact of Noise Correlation on the Single-Symbol ML Decodable Distributed STBCs

Very recently, we proposed the distributed orthogonal space-time block codes (DOSTBCs) in [1]. We showed that the DOSTBCs achieved the single-symbol maximum likelihood (ML) decodability and the full diversity order. Furthermore, we studied some special DOSTBCs, namely the row- monomial DOSTBCs, which generated uncorrelated noises at the destination. We showed that the row-monomial DOSTBCs achieved approximately twice higher bandwidth efficiency than the repetition-based cooperative strategy. However, the data-rate of the DOSTBC was not analyzed in [1]. In this paper, we consider the general DOSTBCs, which possibly generate correlated noises at the destination. We derive an upper bound of the data- rate of the DOSTBC. This upper bound is larger than that of the row-monomial DOSTBC, and hence, the DOSTBCs can potentially improve the bandwidth efficiency of the cooperative network.