Diversity exploitation in multi-source cooperations with multiple antennas at the destination

In amplify-and-forward (AF) based multi-source multi-relay cooperative networks, system diversity will be restricted by the channels of the forwarding hop in the absence of direct source-destination links in Rayleigh fading. In this letter, we dedicate to solve this bottleneck by deploying multiple antennas at the destination. By analyzing the outage bounds and diversity order of the system, we make a conclusion that both forms of diversity, cooperative diversity and multiuser diversity, can be fully exploited when the number of antennas is not less than the number of sources.