On the Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff for Multi-Antenna Multi-Relay Channels

In this paper we analyze the performance of multiple relay channels when multiple antennas are deployed only at relays. Specifically, we investigate the simple repetition-coded decode-and-forward protocol and apply two antenna combining techniques at relays, namely maximum ratio combining (MRC) on receive and transmit beamforming (TB). We assume that the total number of antennas at all relays is fixed to N. With a reasonable power constraint at the relays, we show that the antenna combining techniques can exploit the full spatial diversity of the relay channels and can achieve the same diversity multiplexing tradeoff as achieved by more complex space-time distributed coding techniques, such as those proposed by Laneman and Womell (2003).