Multiple-Symbol differential detection for distributed space-time block coding cooperative system

Abstract

In distributed space-time coding cooperative systems, differential detection gains much attention because it needs no channel state information at the receivers. But conventional differential detection performs about 3dB loss than coherent detection. In this paper, we propose a multiple-symbol differential detection algorithm for relay networks based on maximum-likelihood principle. The simulation results show that the multiple-symbol differential detection can narrow the performance gap between the conventional differential detection and coherent detection for Alamouti and square real orthogonal coding systems with corresponding numbers of relays, especially in high signal-tonoise ratio regime. And with the increase of observation window size, the Doppler effect on performance is decreased and the error floor encountered in conventional differential detection can be eliminated provided that the value of observation window size is sufficiently high.