Performance of digital transceiver for space-time coded cooperative multihop wireless communication systems

This paper describes the performance of a digital transceiver for field trials of multi-hop wireless systems employing space-time coded cooperative relaying. Computer simulations show that cooperative multihop communications give a significant improvement in frame error rate (FER) than non-cooperative multihop systems. Further improvement can be expected by increasing the number of hops and the number of cooperative terminals at each hop. However, this benefit should be evaluated in actual environments, rather than in ideal fading channels assumed in computer simulations. Toward this goal, digital radio transceivers are being built to transmit and receive space-time coded signals. In this paper, the performance of this digital radio transceiver is reported.