Space-Time Trellis Coding Exploiting Superimposed Transmissions in Half-Duplex Relay Networks

This work presents and analyzes a cooperative relaying approach which offers large scale spatial diversity and an additional coding advantage in a virtual antenna array. It utilizes a network of alternately sending and receiving relays whereas only one relay is sending at a particular time. The relay network is used to inherently implement a serial concatenation of a distributed Space-Time Trellis Code and an outer convolutional code. This paper discusses the influence of the source power allocation, network size and inter-relay interference. It further shows the performance compared to conventional relaying and a cooperative relaying protocol using orthogonal subchannels by means of the E_b/N₀ gain over direct transmission.