The Impact of Channel Reuse on the Performance of Multi-Hop Virtual MIMO Systems

In this paper the impact of the reuse of radio resources on the performance of multi-hop virtual multiple-input-multiple-output (V-MIMO) systems is investigated. In our scenario, we assume that the source transmits data to a destination node through the use several relay nodes. Each node cooperates with neighboring devices to exploit spatial diversity by means of the concept of virtual antenna array (VAA). Performance is evaluated in terms of outage probability, defined as the probability that the capacity between source and destination is smaller than a given threshold. The role of interference on the performance of the reuse strategies considered in the paper is also analyzed.