Adaptive transmission in MIMO AF relay networks with orthogonal space-time block codes over Nakagami-m fading

In this article, we apply different adaptive transmission techniques to dual-hop multiple-input multiple-output amplify-and-forward relay networks using orthogonal space-time block coding over independent Nakagami-m fading channels. The adaptive techniques investigated are optimal simultaneous power and rate (OSPR), optimal rate with constant power (ORCP), and truncated channel inversion with fixed rate (TCIFR). The expressions for the channel capacity of OSPR, ORCP, and TCIFR, and the outage probability of OSPR, and TCIFR are derived based on the characteristic function of the reciprocal of the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination. For sufficiently high SNR, the channel capacity of ORCP asymptotically converges to OSPR while OSPR and ORCP achieve higher channel capacity compared to TCIFR. Although TCIFR suffers from an increase in the outage probability relative to OSPR, it provides the lowest implementation complexity among the considered schemes. Along with analytical results, we further adopt Monte Carlo simulations to validate the theoretical analysis.