Capacity Analysis of Two-Hop Virtual MIMO Systems in a Poisson Field of Nodes

In this paper we investigate the performance of two-hop virtual multiple-input-multiple-output systems with random location of nodes. In the scenario we consider the communication between source and destination through the use (following a decode-and-forward approach) of a relay node. A number of ancillary nodes, distributed according to a Poisson point process, are supposed to be distributed around source, relay and destination, with the possibility to create clusters of cooperating nodes. Random fluctuations are accounted for in the channel model which considers both slow and fast fading. Performance is evaluated in terms of outage probability, defined as the probability that the achieved capacity between source and destination is smaller than a given threshold. Finally, the total power consumed by the network for delivering the data is evaluated. Results obtained in the two-hop communication protocol are compared with the single-hop case.