  Recently, a special class of complex designs called Training-Embedded Complex
Orthogonal Designs (TE-CODs) has been introduced to construct single-symbol
Maximum Likelihood (ML) decodable (SSD) distributed space-time block codes
(DSTBCs) for two-hop wireless relay networks using the amplify and forward
protocol. However, to implement DSTBCs from square TE-CODs, the overhead due to
the transmission of training symbols becomes prohibitively large as the number
of relays increase. In this paper, we propose TE-Coordinate Interleaved
Orthogonal Designs (TE-CIODs) to construct SSD DSTBCs. Exploiting the block
diagonal structure of TE-CIODs, we show that, the overhead due to the
transmission of training symbols to implement DSTBCs from TE-CIODs is smaller
than that for TE-CODs. We also show that DSTBCs from TE-CIODs offer higher rate
than those from TE-CODs for identical number of relays while maintaining the
SSD and full-diversity properties.
