Outage performance of dual hop full-duplex relaying with Alamouti/MRC over Rayleigh fading channels

In this study, we present a full-duplex (FD) transmission scheme based on conventional Alamouti coding technique and investigate end-to-end (e2e) outage probability (OP) performance over independent identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels in dual-hop relay networks. We assume that direct link is not available due to channel impairments, so that the communication between the source and destination is maintained only via a single relay. In the network, the relay is equipped with one receive and one transmit antennas, and adopts amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols. While Alamouti code is used at the transmitter side, maximal-ratio combining (MRC) technique is employed at the destination in order to provide higher diversity order. OP expressions are derived in single integral and closed forms for AF and DF protocols, respectively. In addition, in order to provide insight into OP, asymptotic OP expressions are also derived. The analytical derivations are verified by the Monte Carlo simulations. Results show that e2e performance of the system is improved at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region by increasing the number of antennas at the destination and DF provides approximately 2 dB SNR gain as compared to AF.