Outage Probability for MIMO Relay Channel

The channel capacity for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay channel is still an open problem. In view of this gap, upper and lower bounds were found by Wang et al., 2005. This paper presents an extensive study of mutual information and outage probability of Rayleigh fading MIMO relay channels based on the eigenvalues distribution for the sum of complex Wishart matrices. Interestingly, for certain scenarios, upper and lower bounds are coincident providing the real channel capacity. To compute outage probability, a Gaussian approximation for mutual information has been used. Furthermore, it was proposed an equivalent distribution for the sum of Wishart matrices, which proves to be excellent in all scenarios. Closed-form expressions for probability density function and outage probability have been found for the general case of any number of antennas and any SNR values. Analytical expressions have been validated by means of Monte Carlo simulations.