In this letter, two new network coding (NC) diversity enhancement schemes are introduced for wireless relay systems. Conventional diversity enhancement approaches for relay systems suffer from error propagation at each relay and exhibit second order diversity performance. In the proposed schemes, when a relay experiences a decoding failure, the relay makes a request to have the source transmit the NC frames to the destination in its time slot. Due to this operation, the proposed schemes prevent error propagation and achieve near third order diversity performance. The proposed schemes are compared to conventional schemes based on the derived mathematical error bounds and simulation performance, both of which demonstrate the superiority of the proposed schemes.

In this letter, a generalized extension of the linear Z4 space time (ST) code of [1] is conducted to obtain a linear Zw structure that can be flexibly used for various numbers of transmitter antennas, number of states, and modulation types. Additionally, the corresponding recursive systematic (RS) code structure is presented. The optimal code of the quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) and 8 phase shift keying (PSK) modulation with 2 transmit antenna case is obtained from a code search and analyzed in comparison to the codes of [5]. Additionally, the structure for the 8, 32, and other number of states that were not provided in are [1] presented in this paper.

In this letter, a circulation-based distributed space time trellis code (DSTTC) technique for amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying is proposed. The proposed circulation technique is a method of configuring new protocols from the existing protocols of which the performance is dependent on specific source to relay links. The simulation results show that the newly developed protocol is less dependent on weak conditions of specific links and a performance gain in frame error rate (FER) can be obtained over the original protocol.

In this letter, an M-ary extension to the soft information relaying (SIR) scheme is derived for distributed turbo codes (DTCs) to enable higher data rate wireless communications with extended ranges. The M-ary based SIR design for DTCs is based on constructing a revised mapping constellation of the signals for calculating metrics from the soft mapping symbols. The numerical results show that DTCs using the proposed M-ary SIR with gray mapped quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) provides a significant 5 dB performance gain over hard information relaying (HIR) DTCs at the 10-3 bit error rate (BER) level.