On the Performance of Cooperative Amplify-and-Forward Relay Networks

This paper provides a general analysis of cooperative amplify-and-forward relay networks and gives a unified and comparative view of various proposed systems. The studied cooperative relay networks offer spatial diversity gains that conventional multi-antenna systems often fail to achieve due to limitations of the feasible number of antennas per terminal and correlated propagation. We first present a general analysis for the case of multiple antennas per node, which is subsequently used to investigate the relative attractiveness of cooperative schemes for various parameters that include SNR, spectral efficiency, and spatial correlation. We conclude that such virtual antenna arrays are an attractive option to overcome the drawbacks of conventional relaying systems.

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