Effective multi-source cooperative relaying transmission with minimum control overhead

In this paper, focusing on a multi-source, two-stage selective decode-and-forward (DF) relaying network in which the multiple sources have a common destination, we propose an effective cooperative relaying transmission scheme via exploiting decentralized distributed space-time block coding (Dis-STBC). This scheme is a unified multi-source cooperative transmission scheme, regardless of the number of the potential relays which can recover the messages from all the active sources. In particular, even if most or all of potential relays can only recover the messages from a subset of all the active sources, the proposed scheme can work well without introducing additional overhead and increasing processing complexity. Because the achieved diversity order of decentralized Dis-STBC is a random variable, based on the proposed scheme, the multi-source diversity benefit is analyzed by deriving the probability distribution of the achieved diversity order. Finally, the end-to-end outage performance is evaluated under realistic environment.