On the performance of decode-and-forward relaying with multi-antenna destination

In recent times, relay based cooperative communication has emerged a viable means of communication, dealing with harsh multi-path fading and improving link performance. In this paper, closed form expressions of outage probability, average symbol error rate, average received SNR and channel capacity have been derived, for the case when communication between the source and multi-antenna destination (base station) is supported by a single antenna adaptive decode and forward (DF) relay in Rayleigh fading channel. Comparative performance of such system with conventional single input multiple output (SIMO) system, for different path-loss conditions and various number of antenna elements on destination, have also been studied. Numerical results show that, transmission through relay performs better than SIMO under high path-loss conditions if the SNR is maintained above some threshold value.