Outage Performance of Heterogeneous MIMO Relaying in OSTBC Transmission over Spatially Correlated Nakagami Fading Channels

In this letter, we investigate a heterogeneous multi-hop relaying system in which relay nodes (RNs) use different relaying methods due to the different versions or the cost structure of deployed RN equipments. Especially, we provide the outage performance of heterogeneous multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relaying of orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC) transmission for spatially correlated Nakagami fading channels. In this letter, the heterogeneous RNs are comprised of decouple-and-forward (DCF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relays. The outage probability is obtained by assuming an ideal amplifying gain for DCF relaying and then verified with numerical investigation. The numerical results also show the impact of various combinations of DCF and DF RNs on the outage performance.