Performance Analysis for Multi-Pair Massive MIMO AF Relay Networks with ZF Processing

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a multi-pair massive MIMO AF relay network, where multiple source users communicate with multiple destination users through a relay equipped with a very large number of antennas, when zero-forcing (ZF) reception/transmission is utilized at the relay. In contrast to prior works, we derive new exact analytical closed-form expressions of the outage probability and the ergodic achievable rate, and these results are valid for any finite number of relay antennas. In particular, the asymptotic performance and power-scaling laws are further analyzed and compared under two different asymptotic cases for the number of relay antennas going to infinity with a fixed and large number of user pairs, respectively. Both analytical results and Mont-Carlo simulations have consistently shown the effects of the number of relay antennas and the number of user pairs on the outage probability, the achievable rate, and power-scaling laws.