Design Criteria for Distributed Multi-Layer Full-Rate Space Time Coding in Wireless Relay Networks

It has been proved that when the transmit power is sufficiently large distributed space time codes can achieve the maximal diversity order in a wireless relay network. In the previous works, space time codes used in a wireless relay network are limited on unitary space time codes or orthogonal (or quasi- orthogonal) space time codes. In this paper, we apply general multi-layer full-rate space time codes generated by algebraic extension into the wireless relay network. Moreover, the optimal power allocation and the Chernoff upper bound of the pair-wise error probability (PEP) based on the maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding are calculated. Based on this bound, two design criteria of the multi-layer full-rate space time codes are provided.