In this paper, we present a new closed-form formula for the ergodic capacity of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless channels. Assuming independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh flat-fading between antenna pairs and equal power allocation to each of the transmit antennas, the ergodic capacity of such channels is expressed in closed form as finite sums of the exponential integrals which are the special cases of the complementary incomplete gamma function. Using the asymptotic capacity rate of MIMO channels, which is defined as the asymptotic growth rate of the ergodic capacity, we also give simple approximate expressions for the MIMO capacity. Numerical results show that the approximations are quite accurate for the entire range of average signal-to-noise ratios.

In this paper, we consider decouple-and-forward (DCF) relaying, where the relay encodes and amplifies decoupled data using orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs), to achieve the maximum diversity gain of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying. Since the channel status of all antennas is generally unknown and time-varying for cooperation in multi-antenna multiple-relay systems, we investigate an opportunistic relaying scheme for DCF relaying to harness distributed antennas and minimize the cooperation overheads by not using the global channel state information (CSI). In addition, for realistic wireless channels which have spatial fading correlation due to closely-spaced antenna configurations and poor scattering environments, we analyze the exact and lower bound on the symbol error probability (SEP) of the opportunistic DCF relaying over spatially correlated MIMO Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results show that, even in the presence of spatial fading correlation, the proposed opportunistic relaying scheme is efficient and achieves additional performance gain with low overhead.

Coordinated multi-point processing at multiple base stations can improve coverage, system throughput, and cell-edge throughput for future cellular systems. In this paper, we study the coordinated reception of transmitted signals at multiple MIMO base stations to exploit cooperative diversity. In particular, we propose to employ cooperative multicell automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol via backhaul links. The attractiveness of this protocol is that processing between coordinated base stations can be made completely transparent to the mobile user, and it improves the mobile user's link reliability and throughput significantly compared to noncooperative ARQ protocol. In our proposed protocol, we consider the scenario where the multicell processing involves one of the following three schemes: decode-and-forward, amplify-and-forward, and compress-and-forward schemes. We derive the average packet error rate and throughput for these cooperative multicell ARQ protocols. Numerical results show that the cooperative multicell ARQ protocols are promising in terms of average packet error rate and throughput. Furthermore, we show that the degree of improvement depends on the type of cooperative multicell ARQ protocol employed and the operating average signal-to-noise ratio of the main and backhaul links.

In this paper, we derive the exact average symbol error probability (SEP) of M-ary phase-shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation signals over Stacy fading channels. The Stacy fading is modelled by a three-parameter generalized gamma or physically α-µ fading distribution, spanning a wide range of small-scale fading such as Rayleigh, Nakagami-m, and Weibull fading. The average SEP is generally expressed in terms of (generalized) Fox's H-functions, which particularizes to the previously known results for some special cases. We further analyze the diversity order achieved by orthogonal space-time block codes in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Stacy fading channels.