Average Error Rate of Multi-Antenna Decode and Forward Cooperative Relay Network

Cooperative relaying is emerging as a powerful mean of exploiting broadcast nature of the channel to provide diversity gain and improve link performance for single-antenna wireless terminals. In this paper, we investigate the average error performance of cooperative relay network employing infrastructure based fixed relays having multiple antennas. A closed form expression of average error rate for such system has been derived when the relay performs selection combining and destination performs MRC combining of signals. The effect of relay placement on the system performance has also been studied.