Near-orthogonal randomized space-time block codes for multi-hop cooperative networks

In this paper, near-orthogonal random space-time block codes (STBCs) are used to design near-orthogonal channels to transmit information independently in a fully opportunistic multi-hop strip-shaped cooperative wireless network. This opportunistic large array (OLA) network is considered to have fixed hop boundaries having constant node density and operating on decode-and-forward (DF) relaying mode. To deal with random number of DF nodes, in each hop, directional statistical concepts are used for the randomization of underlying deterministic STBC letting each node to transmit linear combination of symbols or STBC columns. The transmissions are modeled stochastically with Markov chain. Network performance is evaluated on the basis of one-hop success probability and coverage for different number of nodes per hop, and dimensions of STBCs.