Cooperative Transmission Using Quasi-Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes with Adaptive Decode-and-Forward Relaying Protocol

In this paper, we propose a cooperative transmission scheme using quasi-orthogonal space-time block codes (QOSTBCs) for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay networks. Comparing with the conventional cooperative transmission scheme using orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs), the proposed scheme can achieve higher bandwidth efficiency with the same decoding complexity. Moreover, an adaptive decode-and-forward (ADF) relaying protocol is proposed based on one-bit channel state information (CSI) feedback. According to the CSI feedback, a better transmission mode can be selected between the direct transmission and decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative transmission. In addition, the outage performance of the proposed scheme is investigated and a closed-form upper bound on the outage probability is derived. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme can achieve a full diversity order, which is higher than that of the direct and DF cooperative transmissions.