Performance analysis of linear receivers in a MIMO relaying system

We investigate the performance of linear receivers in a cooperative system which consists of a source, a decode-and-forward (DF) relay and a destination that are all multi-antenna nodes. The relay uses zero-forcing (ZF) equalization whereas the destination employs maximum ratio combining (MRC) as well as ZF techniques. Considering that perfect channel state information is available at the relay and destination, and the fading is Rayleigh, we derive a closed-form approximate expression for the outage probability of the post-receiver signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of each data stream at the destination and analyze the diversity order. The validity of the outage probability expression is confirmed with the numerical results.