Performance Analysis of MIMO Cooperative Relaying System Based on Alamouti STBC and Amplify-and-Forward Schemes

Performance analysis of cooperative multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relaying system with a single relay is discussed in this paper. The MIMO scheme is based on Alamouti space-time block coding (STBC) over Rayleigh flat fading channels. The source node, equipped with two transmit antennas, simply broadcasts each STBC code to the relay and the destination nodes. Then, the relay node, 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 symbol error probability (SEP) and the outage probability are 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). Subsequently, simulation results are provided to verify the validity of the analytical results.