Field Experimental Results of Multi-Hop Cooperative Communications Using STBC Technique

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