The Impact of Coherence Diversity on MIMO RelaysThis paper studies MIMO relays with non-identical link coherence times, a
frequently occurring condition when, e.g., the nodes in the relay channel do
not all have the same mobility, or the scatterers around some nodes have
different mobility compared with those around other nodes. Despite its
practical relevance, this condition, known as coherence diversity, has not been
studied in the relay channel. This paper studies the performance of MIMO relays
and proposes efficient transmission strategies under coherence diversity. Since
coherence times have a prominent impact on channel training, we do not assume
channel state is available to the decoder for free; all channel training
resources are accounted for in the calculations. A product superposition
technique is employed at the source, which allows a more efficient usage of
degrees of freedom when the relay and the destination have different training
requirements. Varying configurations of coherence times are studied. The
interesting case where the different link coherence intervals are not a
multiple of each other, and therefore the coherence intervals do not align, is
studied. Relay scheduling is combined with the product superposition to obtain
further gains in degrees of freedom. The impact of coherence diversity is
further studied in the presence of multiple parallel relays.
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