The paper studies effective protocols and corresponding performance of automatic retransmission request (ARQ) via decode-and-forward (DF) opportunistic distributed space-time coding (ODSTC). Analysis shows that the diversity via ARQ can be drastically increased by allowing non-active relays to overhear the DSTC signal sent by the active relays. Nevertheless, simple schemes without overhearing may also achieve the same diversity when the link quality between the source-relay or the relay-destination is good, hence greatly alleviating the need for a complex protocol with overhearing. Moreover, using more relays opportunistically does provide a higher coding gain if the source-relay channel quality is extremely good, otherwise using two or three relays gives almost the same performance as if using all of them.
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