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