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 destina- tion, 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 evalu- ated 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. Index Terms—Virtual MIMO, Capacity, Two-Hop, Connectiv- ity.