Achievable Rates of Multi-Hop and Cooperative MIMO Amplify-and-Forward Relay Systems with Full CSI

In this paper, two types of MIMO amplify-and-forward relay systems are considered: multi-hop and cooperative. For both cases, the problem of maximizing the achievable rate over the covariance matrices of the symbols transmitted by the source and relay linear processing matrix is formulated under the assumption of full channel state information at each node. A sub-optimal iterative algorithm is proposed and proved by numerical simulations to outperform known schemes