Joint Relay and Antenna Selection in MIMO PLNC Inter-vehicular Communication Systems over Cascaded Fading Channels

We investigate the joint relay and antenna selection performance in a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication system employing physical layer network coding (PLNC) with amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme at the relay antenna. Analytic results are derived under the cascaded Nakagami-m fading channel model assumption, which covers cascaded Rayleigh and conventional cellular channel models as well. We evaluate the performance of the system in terms of joint outage probability of sources and derive closed-form expressions for lower and upper bounds while an exact expression is found as a single integral form. Besides, the asymptotic diversity order is analyzed and quantified as a function of number of relays and antennas installed on the source and relay vehicles, and channel parameters. Finally, we verify the analytic derivations by computer simulations. Our results show that the outage probability performance decreases with the increasing cascading degrees of the channels but joint relay and antenna selection enhances the performance of the system superbly with the increasing number of relays and antennas. Also it is shown throughout all the simulation results, the lower bound for the joint outage probability seems to consistently be well tight for large SNR. Therefore it can be used for practical design of inter-vehicular communication systems which contain multiple relays and antennas.