Symbol Error Rate of Space-Time Coded Multi-Antenna Wireless Cooperative Networks

In this paper, we propose a generalized cooperative signal transmission model for wireless networks. In this model, the source, the destination, and an arbitrary number of relay nodes may have multiple antennas. The source node uses an orthogonal space- time block code for signal transmission over its multiple antennas to each of the relays and the destination node. Each relay performs a linear processing on the received signals and transmits the processed samples to the destination after encoding them using an orthogonal space-time block code. We analyze the performance of the proposed cooperative model by finding an approximate formula for its symbol error rate at high signal to noise ratios, which determines the total diversity order of the cooperative network. The achieved results show that various cooperative structures with different numbers of relay nodes and different numbers of antennas at each of the source, the destination and the relays, can have the same error rate performance at high signal to noise ratios.