Performance analysis of V‐BLAST reception under multiuser decode‐and‐forward cooperation

The performance of a dual‐hop system is studied and evaluated, where m single‐antenna source nodes communicate with a destination equipped with n ≥ m antennas via m single‐antenna relays. The decode‐and‐forward protocol is implemented at the relays whereas the classical ordered V‐BLAST scheme is performed at the destination. The analysis involves spatially independent non‐identically distributed Rayleigh channel fading channels, reflecting on distinct average received powers among the different source and/or relay nodes with the destination, suitable for practical applications. The identically distributed scenario is also included as a special case. Novel union closed‐form system bound expressions are derived in terms of the outage probability and the average symbol error probability. These bounds correspond to the cases of both the perfect and the imperfect channel state information at the relay and the destination nodes. The numerical results, accompanied with the equivalent simulation ones, reveal the accuracy of the proposed approach.