Unified OSTBC-based communication scheme for cooperative space vehicles

In many spatial cooperative vehicle networks, omni-directional communication is preferred due to its flexibility for networking. In the recent studies, space time code was shown to be an effective approach for improving the performance of the omni-directional communication between space vehicles. This paper studies the unified scheme for the orthogonal space time block code–based transmission between two space vehicles equipped with different numbers of antennas. It is obtained that at most six passive antennas and four RF chains are enough for the typical use. In the proposed scheme, the receiver can perform a unified detection procedure regardless of the actual number of the transmit antennas, which facilitates the practical application. Simulation results validate the proposed scheme in terms of the cumulative distribution function of the received signal-to-noise ratios.