Space Time Coding in Amplify-and-Forward Cooperative Channel

Cooperative diversity enables single antenna transmitter in a multi-user environment to share the antennas so as to achieve transmission diversity. This article analyzes the performances of combining cooperative diversity with space-time coding techniques which have been developed for multi-antenna arrays. The theoretical and simulation results show that, using space-time coding approaches in a simple amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative channel can always achieve the better performance than existing techniques without introducing the space-time coding. In particular, we present a criterion of relay-selection based on position of the relay and SNR gains of the relay channels.