Outage Performance of Bidirectional Full-Duplex Amplify-and-Forward Relay Network with Transmit Antenna Selection and Maximal Ratio Combining

—In this paper, a bidirectional full-duplex amplifyand-forward (AF) relay network with multiple antennas at source nodes is proposed. Assuming that the channel state information is known at the source nodes, transmit antenna selection and maximal ratio combining (MRC) are employed when source nodes transmit information to the relay node and receive information from the relay node respectively, in order to improve the overall signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR). Analytical expressions are derived for tight upper bound SINR at the relay node and source nodes upon reception. Further, closed form expressions are also derived for end-to-end outage probability of the proposed bidirectional full-duplex AF relay network in the Nakagami-m fading channel environment. Although self-interference at the relay node limits the performance of the full-duplex network, the outage performance of the proposed network is better than that of conventional bidirectional full-duplex and half-duplex AF relay networks, due to the selection diversity gain in TAS and diversity and array gain in MRC.