Cyclic Distributed Space–Time Codes for Wireless Relay Networks With No Channel Information

In this paper, we present a coding strategy for half duplex wireless relay networks, where we assume no channel knowledge at any of the transmitter, receiver, or relays. The coding scheme uses distributed space-time coding, that is, the relay nodes cooperate to encode the transmitted signal so that the receiver senses a space-time codeword. It is inspired by noncoherent differential techniques. The proposed strategy is available for any number of relays nodes. It is analyzed, and shown to yield a diversity linear in the number of relays. We also study the resistance of the scheme to relay node failures, and show that a network with
R
relay nodes and
d
of them down behaves, as far as diversity is concerned, as a network with
R
-
d
nodes. Finally, our construction can be easily generalized to the case where the transmitter and receiver nodes have several antennas.