Cascaded orthogonal space-time block codes for wireless multi-hop relay networks

Distributed space-time block coding is a diversity technique to mitigate the effects of fading in multi-hop wireless networks, where multiple relay stages are used by a source to communicate with its destination. This article proposes a new distributed space-time block code called the cascaded orthogonal space-time block code (COSTBC) for the case where the source and destination are equipped with multiple antennas and each relay stage has one or more multiple antenna relays. Each relay stage is assumed to have receive channel state information (CSI) for all the channels from the source and all relays from previous stages to itself, while the destination is assumed to have receive CSI for all the channels. To construct the COSTBC, multiple orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) are used in cascade by the source and each relay stages. In the COSTBC, each relay stage separates the constellation symbols of the OSTBC sent by the preceding relay stage using its CSI, and then transmits another OSTBC to the next relay stage. COSTBCs are shown to achieve the maximum diversity gain in a multi-hop wireless network with linear decoding complexity thanks to the connection to OSTBCs. Several explicit constructions of COSTBCs are also provided, and their performance is simulated in different relay configurations.