Randomized distributed multi-antenna systems in multi-path channels

A great deal of research on MIMO systems is now trying to focus on distributed designs to bring the advantages of co-located antenna systems to nodes with a single RF front end, by leveraging on the other nodes resources. Yet, most schemes that are considered assume that the nodes encode their signals in a fashion that requires at least the knowledge of the number of nodes involved and in many cases the specific encoding rule to use. Hence, while the hardware resources are distributed, the protocols that are proposed are not. Recently we have proposed schemes that are totally decentralized and using random matrix theory we have studied the diversity attainable through these schemes in flat fading channels. The goal of this paper is to show that our general randomized designs are suitable to work in frequency selective channels and can easily be adapted to block space-time precoding schemes that are known to harvest diversity not only from the multiple antennas but also from the multi-path.