Reliability-aware iterative detection scheme (RAID) for distributed IDM space-time codes in relay systems

In this article, distributed interleave-division multiplexing space-time codes (dIDM-STCs) are applied for multi-user two-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relay networks. In case of decoding errors at the relays which propagate to the destination, severe performance degradations can occur as the original detection scheme for common IDM-STCs does not take any reliability information about the first hop into account. Here, a novel reliability-aware iterative detection scheme (RAID) for dIDM-STCs is proposed. This new detection scheme takes the decoding reliability of the relays for each user into account for the detection at the destination. Performance evaluations show that the proposed RAID scheme clearly outperforms the original detection scheme and that in certain scenarios even a better performance than for adaptive relaying schemes can be achieved.