Performance analysis of OSTBC transmission in lossy forward MIMO relay networks

Abstract We analyze the outage probability for the orthogonal space-time block code based multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay networks, composed of one source, one relay, and a single destination. The relay forwards the decoded and interleaved information sequence even though the information part may contain error(s), according to the lossy forward strategy. In spatially independent MIMO channels, we find that the diversity order of the relay network can be interpreted and formulated by the well-known max-flow min-cut theorem. Moreover, we extend the analysis to the case of spatially correlated MIMO channels. Approximated explicit expressions for the outage probabilities are obtained in high signal-to-noise ratio regime