Linear processing for dual-hop AF relay systems with interference: Outage probability analysis

This paper investigates the impact of different linear processing techniques on the outage performance of dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying systems with co-channel interference (CCI) at the multiple antenna relay. Specifically, three heuristic linear precoding schemes are proposed to combat the detrimental effect of CCI, namely, 1) Maximum ratio combining/maximal ratio transmission (MRC/MRT), 2) Zero-forcing/MRT (ZF/MRT), 3) Minimum mean-square error/MRT (MMSE/MRT). New exact outage expressions as well as simple high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) outage approximations are derived for all three schemes. Our results demonstrate that while the MRC/MRT and the MMSE/MRT schemes achieve a full diversity order of N, the ZF/MRT scheme can only achieve a diversity order of N-M, where N is the number of relay antennas and M is the number of interferers. In addition, it is observed that the MMSE/MRT scheme always achieves the best outage performance. The ZF/MRT scheme outperforms the MRC/MRT scheme in the low SNR regime, and exhibits an inferior performance compared to the MRC/MRT scheme in the high SNR regime.