Asymptotic Performance Analysis of Massive MIMO Relay Systems With Multi-Pair Devices Over Correlated Fading Channels

In this paper, we investigate a relay system with multi-pair single-antenna devices, where massive antenna array (also known as massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technology) is deployed at the relay with low-complexity maximum-ratio combining/maximum-ratio transmission precoding scheme. By combining massive MIMO and relay cooperation, the performance of relay-assisted communication systems is predicted to be dramatically improved in many areas, e.g., spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, inter-user interference cancelation, and so on, by exploring the abundant spatial degree of freedom of massive MIMO. However, a large number of antennas employed at relay node inevitably leads to antenna correlation because of small antenna spacing subjected to the limited size of the relay node, which may affect the system performance and has not yet been compressively studied. Thus, we focus on analyzing the effect of antenna correlation on the asymptotic performance of system ergodic rate by using a general channel correlation model. First, by means of the deterministic equivalent technology, the analytical expression of the ergodic rate with arbitrary channel correlations is derived, which presents the quantitative relations among system parameters, i.e., the numbers of relay antennas and device-pairs, the channel spatial correlations at the relay's receiver side and the transmitter side, and the transmit powers of the source devices and the relay. By using a general scaling model for system parameters with respect to the relay antenna number, the asymptotic performance of the ergodic rate under spatially correlated channel and the corresponding scaling laws of the system parameters are obtained, which provides useful guidelines to trade off the transmit power and the ergodic rate as well as the number of the served device-pairs. It is further revealed that the influence degrees of the antenna correlations at the relay's receiver and the transmitter on the ergodic rate is nearly the same. Finally, the analytical conclusions are justified through the numerical simulations.