Outage probability analysis of space-time block coding-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing cooperative systems

In this study, the performance of a multi-carrier (MC) multi-relay system with multi-antenna at source and destination nodes is investigated based on Alamouti space-time block coding (STBC) and amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative diversity protocol with different schemes. In particular, transmission of each STBC in the system is initiated by signal broadcasting from the source node to the destination node and all the relay nodes. Depending on the cooperative scheme, one or more relays, applying AF protocol, transmit the signal to the destination. Applying maximum ratio combination technique to both the direct and the relayed subcarriers at the destination, the outage probability bounds are analytically derived for various schemes of relaying. Simulation results confirm the validity of the derived bounds, and show that the cooperative MC-multiple-input-multiple-output channel yields a notable outage performance with an acceptable capacity, especially in the average best relay selection scheme, which exploits the limited feedback.