Ergodic Capacity Evaluation of Multi-Hop Decode-and-Forward MIMO-OFDM Relaying Network

Spatial diversity plays a significant role in wireless communication systems, including the Fourth Generation (4G) and Fifth Generation (5G) systems, and it is expected to be a fundamental part of the future wireless communication systems as well. The Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology, which is included in the IEEE 802.16j standard, still holds the most crucial position in the 4G spectrum as it promises to improve the throughput, capacity, spectral, and energy efficiency of wireless communication systems in the 2020s. This makes MIMO a viable technology for delay constrained medical and health care facilities. This paper presents an approximate closed-form expression of the ergodic capacity for the Decode-and-Forward (DF) protocol MIMO-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) relaying network. Although MIMO-OFDM is highly valuable for modern high-speed wireless communication systems, especially in the medical sciences, its performance degrades in multi-hop relay networks. Therefore, in this paper, an approximate closed-form expression is derived for an end-to-end ergodic capacity of multi-hop DF MIMO-OFDM wireless communication system has been presented. Monte-Carlo simulations are conducted to verify the performance of the presented analysis regarding the capacity (bits/s/Hz) for different SNR-dB values for single, 2 × 2, 4 × 4, and multi-hop DF MIMO-OFDM systems. The presented results provide useful insights for the research on the end-to-end ergodic capacity evaluation.