Distributed Space-Frequency Coding over Broadband Relay Channels

Designing diversity achieving schemes over the wireless broadband fading relay channels is crucial to achieve higher diversity gains. These gains are achieved by exploiting the multipath (frequency) and cooperative diversities to combat the fading nature of wireless channels. The challenge is how to design space frequency codes, distributed among randomly located nodes that can exploit the frequency diversity of the wireless broadband channels. In this paper, the design of distributed space-frequency codes (DSFCs) for wireless relay networks is considered. The proposed DSFCs are designed to achieve the frequency and cooperative diversities of the wireless relay channels. The use of DSFCs with the decode-and-forward (DAF) and amplify-and forward (AAF) protocols is considered. The code design criteria to achieve full diversity, based on the pairwise error probability (PEP) analysis, are derived. For DSFC with the DAF protocol, a two-stage coding scheme, with source node coding and relay nodes coding, is proposed. We derive sufficient conditions for the proposed code structures at the source and relay nodes to achieve full diversity of order NL, where N is the number of relay nodes and L is the number of paths per channel. For the case of DSFC with the AAF protocol, a structure for distributed space-frequency coding is proposed.