Unified Performance Analysis of Two-Hop Amplify-and-Forward Relay Systems with Antenna Correlation

We present a unified performance analysis of a system in which the source and the destination are equipped with multiple antennas and communicating via a single antenna relay. Our studies can be divided into two parts. First we consider a system with maximal ratio transmission (MRT) at the source and maximal ratio combining (MRC) at the destination by assuming general correlation structures with arbitrary eigenvalue multiplicities at the source and the destination. Then a system with transmit antenna selection (TAS) at the source with uncorrelated antennas and MRC at the destination with correlated antennas is investigated. The exact closed form expressions for outage probability, average symbol error rate (SER), generalized higher moments of SNR for both channel state information (CSI)-assisted and fixed gain relaying are derived and an analysis of the ergodic capacity is provided. Hence, our new results cover several previously reported cases as well as new additional ones. Further, we present the asymptotic analysis which gives an insight of the system performance and the diversity gain in each case. To verify the analytical results we provide Monte Carlo simulations at the end.