Performance Analysis of Antenna Correlation on LMS-Based Dual-Hop AF MIMO Systems

The concept of relay transmission is applied to land mobile satellite (LMS) communication, where a terrestrial relay node facilitates communication from the satellite to the mobile unit. A novel amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) relay system is proposed where the source, the relay, and the destination are all equipped with multiple antennas. The maximal ratio transmission (MRT)-selection combining (SC) diversity technique is used for the first hop and maximal ratio combining (MRC) is used for the second hop. We analyze the outage probability, the average symbol error rate (SER), and the ergodic capacity, for which accurate closed-form approximations are derived by considering the generalized correlated source-to-relay channel and arbitrary-correlated relay-to-destination channel. The system is also analyzed for an equally correlated source-to-relay channel, which is the special case of generalized correlation, by deriving exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability and average SER and highly accurate closed-form analytical approximation for the ergodic capacity. From high SNR asymptotic analysis, we show that the system achieves full diversity order. The impact of multiple antennas and their correlation on the performance are assessed via several examples.