Outage Performance of Multi-Hop Decouple-and-Forward Relaying in Spatially Correlated MIMO Channels

Abstract

In this letter, the outage performance of multi-hop multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relaying systems is analyzed for spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channels. We focus on nonregenerative MIMO decouple-and-forward (DCF) relaying in orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC) transmission and provide its outage probability given the assumption of ideal relay gain. The outage obtained here is shown a lower bound for using practical gains, which gets tight at high SNR. We conduct numerical studies to assess the impact of the spatial correlation between antennas on the outage probability.