Harmful Cooperation in Relay-Assisted MIMO Under Imperfect CSI

This paper investigates the performance of cooperative multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems under practical operating impairments, with particular emphasis on imperfect channel state information (CSI) and relay decoding errors. Although Decode-and-Forward (DF) relaying can provide diversity gains under ideal assumptions, these gains may significantly degrade in practical wireless environments affected by channel uncertainty. The analysis demonstrates that imperfect CSI introduces residual interference, leading to SINR saturation and BER error floors in the high-SNR regime. In cooperative systems, this degradation becomes more severe due to relay error propagation, where erroneously detected relay symbols introduce additional structured interference at the destination. Consequently, cooperative transmission may underperform direct MIMO communication within specific SNR operating regimes. To characterize this behavior, the concept of a harmful cooperation region is introduced, describing the operating regime in which the combined effects of CSI uncertainty and relay decoding errors render cooperation detrimental. To mitigate these limitations, a reliability-aware relay activation mechanism is proposed, enabling selective relay participation according to channel quality. By suppressing unreliable relay transmissions, the proposed approach significantly reduces error propagation and improves BER performance, particularly in the medium-to-high SNR regime. In addition, the impact of antenna scaling is investigated. The results reveal a robustness transition in which larger MIMO configurations exhibit improved resilience to CSI imperfections due to increased spatial diversity and improved channel conditioning. Overall, the findings demonstrate that cooperative transmission under imperfect CSI is inherently SNR-dependent and that robust system design requires the joint consideration of channel uncertainty, relay reliability, and system dimension.