Outage Probability of Multi-Hop MIMO Relaying with Transmit Antenna Selection and Ideal Relay Gain over Rayleigh Fading Channels

We present a study on the outage probability of multi-hop wireless communication systems with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) link based on the transmit antenna selection and the maximal-ratio combining (MRC) at the receiver. A nonregenerative system (NS) is investigated with an ideal amplifying gain. MEMO channels are assumed in uncorrelated Rayleigh fading. We derive a moment generating function (MGF) of the reciprocal of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and obtain a closed-form approximation oil the outage probability through the numerical inversion of a Laplace transform. Numerical results show that the presented outage is exactly matched with the outage probability when assuming the ideal relay gain. For more practical gains, the result is shown to be a lower-bound that gets tight at high average SNR as well as for a small number of hops and/or of antennas. We also compare the outage probabilities of nonregenerative MIMO relaying with a regenerative counterpart for multiple hops.