Diversity-multiplexing tradeoff analysis of MIMO relay networks with full-duplex relays

A 2-hop MIMO relay network, where the relay can switch between half-duplex (HD) mode and full-duplex (FD) mode is studied. We investigate three practical FD techniques that have attracted a lot of attention recently and analyze their impact on the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) of the network. Specifically, we derive the DMT functions of the network under three practical FD techniques applied at the relay. We show that HD may achieve better performance than FD especially at the low multiplexing gain regime. In some cases, HD even achieves strictly better DMT than FD at all regimes. However, there are also other cases, where FD achieves strictly better performance than HD. Generally, if the optimal multiplexing gain that FD achieves is better than that of HD, we observe that FD is always a better choice at the high multiplexing gain regime.