Throughput analysis of Slotted Aloha multiple hop systems with Virtual Antenna Arrays

We consider multi-hop Virtual Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (V-MIMO) systems when Slotted Aloha is used to select the radio resource at each hop. In a V-MIMO system, the source, destination and relaying nodes cooperate with neighboring devices to exploit spatial diversity by means of the concept of Virtual Antenna Array (VAA). In this paper we consider different approaches to the performance evaluation and identify optimum values for the number of hops when the source-destination distance is set. The trade-off between throughput and energy spent by the nodes is also discussed.