Multi-Hop Relay Networks with Multiple-Antenna Equipped Source and Destination

Abstract

The performance of a multi-hop amplify-and-forward relay network is analyzed. The source and destination terminals are equipped with multiple-antennas and the relays with single-antennas. The cumulative distribution function and the moment generating function of two tight upper bounds of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio are derived. The lower bounds for the outage probability and the average symbol error rate (SER) are also derived. The results take into account the source-relay and the relay-destination correlation matrices; the uncorrelated case is treated as well. The asymptotic outage probability, average SER, diversity order and coding gain are also derived. Numerical results and Monte-Carlo simulations are presented to analyze the system performance and show the tightness of the proposed bounds.