Cascaded TAS/MRC in MIMO Multiuser Relay Networks

We propose cascaded transmit antenna selection with maximal-ratio combining (TAS/MRC) for use in multiuser relay networks (MRN) with N-S, N-R, and N-D antennas at the source, the relay, and each of the K destinations, respectively. We consider opportunistic scheduling where the destination with the highest instantaneous end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is scheduled for transmission. In cascaded TAS/MRC, a single transmit antenna that maximizes the instantaneous received SNR in each hop is selected, and all the receive antennas are MRC combined. We derive new exact closed-form statistics of the end-to-end SNR, from which we derive the exact and the approximate symbol error rate (SER) for M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) and M-ary phase-shift keying (M-PSK). New concise expressions are derived to characterize the diversity order and the array gain. We highlight that our proposed scheme attains the maximum diversity order of N-R x min{N-S, NDK}. Furthermore, we determine the optimal power assignment at the source and the relay that minimizes the SER.