Performance analysis of decode-and-forward relaying for multi-hop Alamouti transmission over Rayleigh fading channels

In this paper, we investigate the performance of the multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) relaying scheme, which combines the Alamouti code with fixed decode-and-forward (DF) protocol. Based on the relationship between the overall signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the system and that of the weakest hop, the closed-form expressions of outage probability and bit error probability for MPSK are derived. The analysis reveals that this scheme achieves the best performance in a limited hop under the spectral efficiency constraint. Various simulation results are performed to verify the analytic ones demonstrating the accuracy of the theoretical approach.