  Differential distributed space-time coding (D-DSTC) has been considered to
improve both diversity and data-rate in cooperative communications in the
absence of channel information. However, conventionally, it is assumed that
relays are perfectly synchronized in the symbol level. In practice, this
assumption is easily violated due to the distributed nature of the relay
networks. This paper proposes a new differential encoding and decoding process
for D-DSTC systems with two relays. The proposed method is robust against
synchronization errors and does not require any channel information at the
destination. Moreover, the maximum possible diversity and symbol-by-symbol
decoding are attained. Simulation results are provided to show the performance
of the proposed method for various synchronization errors and the fact that our
algorithm is not sensitive to synchronization error.
