MIMO Radio Propagation Measurement for Two-Hop Relay Network on L-Shaped Corridor with Network Performance Analysis

Shadowing effect caused by obstacles between transmitter and receiver always weakens the signal in wireless communications. Relay technique is proposed as a solution to the problem of shadowing. Various relaying schemes have been proposed in recent literature. However, in most of the works, performance of relaying schemes were evaluated using theoretical channel models which may be far from realistic environment. In this paper, performance of various relaying schemes are assessed by using real propagation data in a shadowing environment. MIMO wideband propagation measurements are performed in an L-shaped corridor with various positions of relay node. Using measurement data, capacity performance of well-known relaying schemes including decode-and-forward, cooperative relay and two-way relay employing network coding are evaluated. Analysis results show the benefits of relay technique against shadowing effect in a real environment as well as give directions about an optimal location to place the relay node. Furthermore, by comparing performance of different relaying schemes, the paper finds that two-way relay employing network coding has superior performance while the introduction of cooperative relay in an environment, where signal strength of direct link is extremely weak, is not efficient.