Outage Analysis of Space Time Block Coding MIMO Cooperative System with Amplify-and-Forward Scheme

Outage analysis of cooperative space-time block coding (STBC) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relaying system with a single relay is discussed in this paper. The source node, equipped with two transmit antennas, broadcasts each STBC code to the relay and the destination nodes. Then, the relay node also equipped with multiple antennas, amplifies-and-forwards (AF) the received STBC codes. Finally, the destination node uses maximum ratio combining (MRC) and exploits the diversity gain obtained through the direct and the indirect links simultaneously. Lower bounds of the outage probability is derived using the moment generating function (MGF) of the total signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for a particular signal of M-ary-quadrature-amplitude modulation (M-QAM). Simulation results are provided to verify the validity of the analytical results.