Performance analysis of dual-hop dual-antennas MIMO systems in Rayleigh fading

In this paper we study the error and outage probability (OP) performance of dual-hop multiple input multiple output (MIMO) relay systems utilizing Alamouti coding and modified amplify and forward (MAF) relaying in flat Rayleigh fading channels. The error performances of dual-hop MIMO systems with variable gain relays is compared with dual-hop single antenna systems and regenerative i.e. decode and forward (DF) dual-hop MIMO system. Results obtained by means of simulation show that MAF MIMO systems achieve significantly better bit error performance than dual-hop single-antenna systems and comparable performance with DF dual-hop MIMO systems. The performance gap increases with usage of dual antenna in relay and the receiver. The OP performances of these systems are compared with dual-hop single-antenna and dual-antennas point-to-point systems. We show significant improvement of OP performance compared to dual-hop single-antenna and comparable performance with dual-antennas point-to-point systems. Moreover, for OP performance we show exact fit of numerical results with the results obtained by mathematical analysis.