Outage Performance of Selective Dual-Hop MIMO Relaying with OSTBC and Transmit Antenna Selection in Rayleigh Fading Channels

For dual-hop multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) decode-and-forward relaying systems, we propose a selective relaying scheme that uses orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC) and transmit antenna selection with maximal-ratio combining (TAS/MRC) or vice versa at the first and second hops, respectively. The aim is to achieve an asymptotically identical performance to the dual-hop relaying system with only TAS/MRC, while requiring lower feedback overhead. In particular, we give the selection criteria based on the antenna configurations and the average channel powers for the first and second hops, assuming Rayleigh fading channels. Also, the numerical results are shown for the outage performance comparison between the dual-hop DF relaying systems with the proposed scheme, only TAS/MRC, and only OSTBC.