Distributed Generalized Low-Density Codes for Multiple Relay Cooperative Communications

As a class of pseudorandom error correcting codes, generalized low-density (GLD) codes exhibit excellent performance over both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels. In this paper, distributed GLD codes are proposed for multiple relay cooperative communications. Specifically, using the partial error detecting and error correcting capabilities of the GLD code, each relay node decodes and forwards some of the constituent codes of the GLD code to cooperatively form a distributed GLD code, which can work effectively and keep a fixed overall code rate when the number of relay nodes varies. Also, at relay nodes, a progressive processing procedure is proposed to reduce the complexity and adapt to the source-relay channel variations. At the destination, the soft information from different paths is combined for the GLD decoder thus diversity gain and coding gain are achieved simultaneously. Simulation results verify that distributed GLD codes with various number of relay nodes can obtain significant performance gains in quasistatic fading channels compared with the strategy without relays and the performance is further improved when more relays are employed.