Asymptotic Performance Analysis of a K-Hop Amplify-and-Forward Relay MIMO Channel

This paper studies the asymptotic performance of multi-hop amplify-and-forward relay multiple-antenna communication channels. Each multi-antenna relay terminal in the considered network amplifies the received signal, sent by a source, and retransmits it upstream toward a destination. Achievable ergodic rates of the relay channel with both jointly optimal detection and decoding and practical separate-decoding receiver architectures for arbitrary signaling schemes, along with average bit error rates for various types of detectors are derived in the regime where the number of antennas at each terminal grows large without a bound. To overcome the difficulty of averaging over channel realizations, we apply a large-system analysis based on the replica method from statistical physics. The validity of the large-system analysis is further verified through Monte Carlo simulations of realistic finite-sized systems.