Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff in the Low-SNR Regime

An extension of the popular diversity-multiplexing tradeoff framework to the low-SNR (or wideband) regime is proposed. The concept of diversity gain is shown to be redundant in this regime since the outage probability is SNR-independent and depends on the multiplexing gain and the channel power gain statistics only. The outage probability under the DMT framework is obtained in an explicit, closed form for a broad class of channels. The low and high-SNR regime boundaries are explicitly determined for the scalar Rayleigh-fading channel, indicating a significant limitation of the SNR-asymptotic DMT when the multiplexing gain is small.Comment: accepted by IEEE Comm. Letter

On Outage Probability and Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff in MIMO Relay Channels

Fading MIMO relay channels are studied analytically, when the source and destination are equipped with multiple antennas and the relays have a single one. Compact closed-form expressions are obtained for the outage probability under i.i.d. and correlated Rayleigh-fading links. Low-outage approximations are derived, which reveal a number of insights, including the impact of correlation, of the number of antennas, of relay noise and of relaying protocol. The effect of correlation is shown to be negligible, unless the channel becomes almost fully correlated. The SNR loss of relay fading channels compared to the AWGN channel is quantified. The SNR-asymptotic diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) is obtained for a broad class of fading distributions, including, as special cases, Rayleigh, Rice, Nakagami, Weibull, which may be non-identical, spatially correlated and/or non-zero mean. The DMT is shown to depend not on a particular fading distribution, but rather on its polynomial behavior near zero, and is the same for the simple "amplify-and-forward" protocol and more complicated "decode-and-forward" one with capacity achieving codes, i.e. the full processing capability at the relay does not help to improve the DMT. There is however a significant difference between the SNR-asymptotic DMT and the finite-SNR outage performance: while the former is not improved by using an extra antenna on either side, the latter can be significantly improved and, in particular, an extra antenna can be traded-off for a full processing capability at the relay. The results are extended to the multi-relay channels with selection relaying and typical outage events are identified.Comment: accepted by IEEE Trans. on Comm., 201

Impact of Spatial Correlation on the Finite-SNR Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff

The impact of spatial correlation on the performance limits of multielement antenna (MEA) channels is analyzed in terms of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) at finite signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values. A lower bound on the outage probability is first derived. Using this bound accurate finite-SNR estimate of the DMT is then derived. This estimate allows to gain insight on the impact of spatial correlation on the DMT at finite SNR. As expected, the DMT is severely degraded as the spatial correlation increases. Moreover, using asymptotic analysis, we show that our framework encompasses well-known results concerning the asymptotic behavior of the DMT.Comment: Accepted for publication to IEEE Transaction on Wireless Communication on June 4th 200

Towards the Optimal Amplify-and-Forward Cooperative Diversity Scheme

In a slow fading channel, how to find a cooperative diversity scheme that achieves the transmit diversity bound is still an open problem. In fact, all previously proposed amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) schemes do not improve with the number of relays in terms of the diversity multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) for multiplexing gains r higher than 0.5. In this work, we study the class of slotted amplify-and-forward (SAF) schemes. We first establish an upper bound on the DMT for any SAF scheme with an arbitrary number of relays N and number of slots M. Then, we propose a sequential SAF scheme that can exploit the potential diversity gain in the high multiplexing gain regime. More precisely, in certain conditions, the sequential SAF scheme achieves the proposed DMT upper bound which tends to the transmit diversity bound when M goes to infinity. In particular, for the two-relay case, the three-slot sequential SAF scheme achieves the proposed upper bound and outperforms the two-relay non-orthorgonal amplify-and-forward (NAF) scheme of Azarian et al. for multiplexing gains r < 2/3. Numerical results reveal a significant gain of our scheme over the previously proposed AF schemes, especially in high spectral efficiency and large network size regime.Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures, submitted to IEEE trans. IT, revised versio

Asymptotic Performance of Linear Receivers in MIMO Fading Channels

Linear receivers are an attractive low-complexity alternative to optimal processing for multi-antenna MIMO communications. In this paper we characterize the information-theoretic performance of MIMO linear receivers in two different asymptotic regimes. For fixed number of antennas, we investigate the limit of error probability in the high-SNR regime in terms of the Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff (DMT). Following this, we characterize the error probability for fixed SNR in the regime of large (but finite) number of antennas. As far as the DMT is concerned, we report a negative result: we show that both linear Zero-Forcing (ZF) and linear Minimum Mean-Square Error (MMSE) receivers achieve the same DMT, which is largely suboptimal even in the case where outer coding and decoding is performed across the antennas. We also provide an approximate quantitative analysis of the markedly different behavior of the MMSE and ZF receivers at finite rate and non-asymptotic SNR, and show that while the ZF receiver achieves poor diversity at any finite rate, the MMSE receiver error curve slope flattens out progressively, as the coding rate increases. When SNR is fixed and the number of antennas becomes large, we show that the mutual information at the output of a MMSE or ZF linear receiver has fluctuations that converge in distribution to a Gaussian random variable, whose mean and variance can be characterized in closed form. This analysis extends to the linear receiver case a well-known result previously obtained for the optimal receiver. Simulations reveal that the asymptotic analysis captures accurately the outage behavior of systems even with a moderate number of antennas.Comment: 48 pages, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor