Packet Transmission Experiments of STBC-Based Multi-Hop Cooperative Relaying

In multi-hop cooperative communications, multiple relay stations are used at each hop in order to enhance transmission performance. In previous studies, transceivers have been used to evaluate the transmission performance of multi-hop cooperative communications involving the use of a space-time block code, in real propagation channels. In the present study, an experiment involving multi-hop cooperative networks is conducted with transceivers. The transceivers are implemented on field programmable gate arrays, which perform real-time signal processing. Synchronization of the timing and carrier frequency among wireless stations is carried out on the basis of received signals. The transmission performance of cooperative communications is compared to the performance of non-cooperative multi-hop communications involving the use of only one relay station. The performances of the relay schemes are measured quasi-simultaneously. The transmission performance is evaluated in terms of the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the bit error ratio.