Network Coded MIMO Cooperative Communications for the Emergency Area

This work proposed a space–time trellis code (STTC) based network code to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance in transmitting the data from the user to an emergency department. In the proposed scheme, the STTC is implemented in the communication system aided with the network code and amplify-and-forward scheme relay. The STTC scheme encoded the serial data stream to a parallel data stream decoded by the Viterbi algorithms to reduce the transmission time. The proposed scheme improves BER during data transmission. The BER performance of a generic data transmission system, with and without the proposed STTC, are compared. It was found that the generic data transmission system with the proposed scheme achieved better BER performance when transmitting SOS message at the urban area compared to the generic data transmission system without the STTC scheme. By employing the proposed scheme, the BER performance and the transmission time were reduced by 40% even at low signal-to-noise value.