The impact of antenna array on outage performance of cooperative dual hop relay network

Wireless relaying is a promising solution to overcome the channel impairments and provides high data rate coverage that appears for beyond 3G mobile communications. In this paper, we proposed a dual hop wireless communication systems equipped with multiple decode and forward relays over Rayleigh fading channel with the best relay selection. The best relay is selected based on the end to end channel conditions. Prior work on cooperative diversity has focused on the case that each terminal has single antenna. However, in many practical situations, it is feasible for one or more terminals to be equipped with an array of multiple antennas. The array may be at the source, relay or destination. In this paper, we examine the presence of multiple antennas of the distributed cooperative fixed relays in view of the outage performance. We derived the closed form solution of outage probability. The numerical results suggest that it is better to place the array at the relay than at source or destination.