Performances of Amplify-and-Forward Cooperative Relay Networks with Different Topologies

When the sizes of terminals are limited, cooperative relay networks are recommended as promising virtual MIMO systems to improve the performances of wireless communication systems in literature. Accordingly, some comparisons on the performances of different systems are useful to guide the selection and deployment of cooperative relay systems in field applications. In this paper, we compare the outage probabilities of cooperative relay networks of different topologies (different numbers of antennas used at a transmitter and relays used in a system), as well as the outage probabilities of the MISO systems. We propose an aggregated channel mode, which combines the power gain obtained from the reduction of path loss through the deployment of relays, and the flat fading caused by multi-path propagation. During the evaluation of the performances of different systems, we apply information theory in the calculation of ergodic capacities and consider the requirement on wireless resources in the estimation of outage probabilities. Numerical simulation shows that (1) cooperative networks with multiple relays outperform those with multiple antennas; (2) only when the power gain is included, the performances of cooperative relay networks are comparable with their counterparts in direct transmission; (3) the performances are significantly affected by the locations of relays.