Performance of a Novel Relay-STBC-HARQ for Cooperative MIMO System

For a two hop cooperative relay communication system, the first hop mainly gets the diversity gain, and the second hop gets the cooperative gain. While HARQ gets the time diversity gain, space-time or the others coding has the chance to get a tradeoff between diversity gain and multiplex gain. It is significant to combine the HARQ and STBC in a cooperative MIMO system that formed by a set of cooperative relay nodes that should be silent usually. According to analysis the relationship between the VBLAST, HARQ and STBC, this paper proposed a novel Relay-STBC-HARQ strategy. Theoretical and simulation analysis show that the strategy could improve the system capacity by spatial multiplex gain and cooperative gain. This means the strategy could get a tradeoff among credible coverage, flexible BER rate, code rate and delay.