Space-time coding scheme for time-frequency asynchronous two-way relay networks

In this study, the authors develop a distributed space–time coding scheme for a two-way relay network that contains multiple distributed relay nodes. Both the time and frequency asynchronous nature of the distributed system are considered in the design. Distributed convolutional coding is employed to handle multiple timing errors in the networks. The authors prove that under perfect frequency synchronisation, the proposed scheme can achieve both spatial and multipath diversity by linear receivers, such as linear zero-forcing or minimum mean-square-error receiver, thus providing a low decoding complexity. The authors further find that frequency asynchronism has little effect on the designed scheme and show that the diversity can still be achieved almost surely (in the measured theoretic sense) under both time and frequency asynchronous scenarios. The authors also provide numerical results to corroborate the proposed studies.