  Recently Li and Xia have proposed a transmission scheme for wireless relay
networks based on the Alamouti space time code and orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing to combat the effect of timing errors at the relay nodes.
This transmission scheme is amazingly simple and achieves a diversity order of
two for any number of relays. Motivated by its simplicity, this scheme is
extended to a more general transmission scheme that can achieve full
cooperative diversity for any number of relays. The conditions on the
distributed space time code (DSTC) structure that admit its application in the
proposed transmission scheme are identified and it is pointed out that the
recently proposed full diversity four group decodable DSTCs from precoded
co-ordinate interleaved orthogonal designs and extended Clifford algebras
satisfy these conditions. It is then shown how differential encoding at the
source can be combined with the proposed transmission scheme to arrive at a new
transmission scheme that can achieve full cooperative diversity in asynchronous
wireless relay networks with no channel information and also no timing error
knowledge at the destination node. Finally, four group decodable distributed
differential space time codes applicable in this new transmission scheme for
power of two number of relays are also provided.
