On the capacity of certain virtual MIMO schemes for mobie communications

We consider a virtual multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system, where mobile user equipments (UE) in the vicinity of each other act as antennas for each other for communication with a multiple-antenna base station (BS). The UEs communicate with each other on an 'Interlink', and with the BS on an Up/Downlink. A 'Sample-and-Forward' strategy is proposed for the downlink. The capacity of the proposed scheme and of a conventional Decode-and-Forward scheme for the uplink are investigated. Rules for optimal partitioning of time and bandwidth resources between the Interlink and the Up/Downlink are obtained. Capacity outage curves are provided to compare the virtual MIMO schemes with conventional MIMO and single-input-single-output (SISO) schemes.