A relaying scheme using QR decomposition with phase control for MIMO wireless networks

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless networks are wireless communication systems composed of multiple nodes, each of which is equipped with multiple antennas. As proven by earlier studies, point-to-point MIMO systems offer significant capacity through spatial multiplexing and diversity techniques. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that the capacity of MIMO wireless networks can be greatly improved by using multiple relay nodes to relay messages simultaneously from source to destination. This paper proposes a relaying scheme for MIMO wireless networks. Its major concepts are: 1) performing QR decomposition on backward and forward channels in conjunction with phase control at each relay node, and 2) conducting successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the destination node. Such operations enable the wireless network to obtain distributed array gain among multiple relay nodes and receive array gain while maintaining maximum spatial multiplexing gain. Numerical examples have shown that the proposed relaying scheme is superior to previously proposed ones in both ergodic and outage capacity perspective.