Mitigating interference and reducing detection complexity in asynchronous cooperative relay network utilising new distributed space time block coding

The synchronisation in wireless cooperative relay networks is impossible to achieve in real environment utilising orthogonal space time block coding. There have been several approaches proposed to mitigate the effect of synchronisation among the relay nodes at the receiver. All have managed to reduce the inter‐symbol interference at the expense of low data rate with high detection complexity. Others achieved full data rate and high cooperative diversity using high decoding complexity that requires a feedback link. In this paper, a new approach is presented that reduces inter‐symbol interference, achieves full data rate and full cooperative diversity with low complexity. This uses a new efficient distributed orthogonal space time block coding design with a sub‐optimum detection scheme utilising dual relay nodes. This reduces the number of timing misalignments among the relay nodes and minimises the detection complexity. Furthermore, the new proposed method uses linear decoding process to achieve full data rate and full cooperative diversity without the need for any a feedback link. The analytical analysis and simulation results confirmed that sub‐optimum approach with the new efficient design are very effective at reducing the lack of synchronisation among the relay nodes at the destination node with low encoding and decoding complexities.