Error performance of cooperative diversity with distributed space-time code

This paper considers a cooperative communications system consisting of a source, a relay and a destination and using the amplify-and-forward protocol. In the first time phase, the source node radiates data to both the relay and the destination nodes. In the second time phase, however, the relay node and the source node transmit cooperatively to build up a distributed space-time coding scheme. For such a system with independent Rayleigh fading in each link, we obtain its exact BER performance in a one-integral form which can be numerically calculated. The analytic results match accurately with simulation results in various channel conditions.