ZHU YONGLANELECTRICAL & COMPUTER ENGINEERING2010-04-082010-04-082008-12-03ZHU YONGLAN (2008-12-03). Multiple antenna communication over fading channels : Performance limits and cooperative transmission strategies. ScholarBank@NUS Repository.https://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/12897In this dissertation, we investigate performance limits and cooperative transmission strategies for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) and cooperative relay communication systems. We first obtain some bounds on the complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of the mutual information (MI) of a MIMO system in a Rician fading environment. We then turn our attention to cooperative relay systems. We derive the outage probability and ergodic rate for a decode-and-forward (DF) relay system, and propose optimal transmission strategies including transmit signaling and power allocations to minimize outage probability or maximize ergodic rate. The information theoretic study, however, only provides performance limits for the system; it does not allude to any methods for achieving these limits. We apply differential modulation to relay systems and study the relay systems from an end-to-end error performance perspective. The average error probability of the relay systems for decode-and-forward (DF) and selection relaying (SR)protocols are obtained for Rayleigh fading channels.enwireless communication, fading, outage probabilityThesisNOT_IN_WOS