Distributed Space-Time Block Coding for Large and Undetermined Set of Relay Terminals

In this manuscript, a decode-and-forward cooperative diversity scheme for wireless packet transmission network with large and undetermined set of relay terminals is considered. Correctly received signals at some relay terminals are retransmitted to the receiver with the STBC-based cooperative relaying scheme. For large and undetermined set of relay terminals, performance of the conventional STBC-based cooperative diversity is known to be degraded due to the loss of the diversity gain and increasement of decoding complexity. In this manuscript, we propose a signaling scheme to reduce the performance loss. Our proposed scheme is based on the linear transformation of the STBC matrix by a signature vector, which has more degrees of freedom for the assignment of signals compared to the conventional STBC-based cooperative diversity.