Decentralized distributed space-time trellis coding

In this paper, we introduce a new class of distributed space-time trellis codes (DSTTCs) for wireless networks with a large set of decode-and-forward relay nodes N. We consider the general case where each relay node is equipped with N
_T
antennas and the destination node is equipped with N
_R
antennas. It is assumed that at any given time only a small, a priori unknown subset of nodes S ∈ N is active and neither the relay nodes nor the destination node know which relay nodes are active. In the proposed scheme, each node is assigned a signature matrix and the signal transmitted by an active node is the product of the signature matrix and a space-time trellis code (STTC) matrix originally designed for N
_c
co-located antennas. It is shown that existing full-rank STTCs designed for N
_c
⩾ 2 co-located antennas are a favorable choice for the code matrix. Two practical designs for good deterministic signature matrix sets are provided and compared with random signature matrices. If the signature matrices are properly optimized, the proposed DSTTCs achieve a diversity order of d = min{N
_c
N
_R
, N
_T
N
_S
N
_R
} if N
_S
nodes are active. Simulation results confirm that DSTTCs yield significant performance gains over distributed space-time block codes and distributed space-time filtering. Furthermore, equipping relay nodes with a second antenna can be highly beneficial especially if only few nodes can be active at any given time.