Space-Time Coded Cooperative Diversity with Multiple-Antenna Nodes

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a single-relay cooperative scenario where the source, relay and destination terminals are equipped with multiple transmit/receive antennas. We assume conventional space-time block codes are employed in the underlying source-to-destination (S rarr D), source-to-relay (S rarr R) and relay-to-destination (R rarr D) links and consider both decode-and-forward (DaF) and amplify-and-forward (AaF) relaying techniques. Through the derivation of pairwise error probability (PEP), we quantify analytically the impact of multiple antenna deployment for each relaying technique under various scenarios. We further present an extensive Monte Carlo simulation study to corroborate the analytical results and to provide detailed performance comparisons among the relaying techniques under consideration.