STTC design for vehicular communication systems employing fixed-gain AF PLNC over cascaded fading channels

In this study, the authors combine physical layer network coding (PLNC) and space-time trellis coding (STTC) techniques to improve the error performance of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems where all fading channels are assumed to undergo double Rayleigh fading (DRF) which is worse than Rayleigh fading used in cellular communications. In the authors' analysis, they show that the DRF channels can be modelled by using the mixture gamma distribution. After that, pairwise error probability (PEP) analysis is performed for a fixed-gain amplify-and-forward PLNC V2V system employing STTC over the DRF channels, and an upper bound for the PEP is obtained. By examining the behaviour of the upper bound expression in the high SNR region, they derive a new design criterion for STTCs. Finally, using this criterion they propose novel STTCs with 4 and 8 states for V2V systems employing PLNC over the DRF channels.