To improve the reliable performance of information transmission in cooperative relay networks, the scheme of the max-rate spatial channel pairing （SCP） based on maximum ratio combining （MRC） is proposed. The scheme includes three steps： channel phase cancellation, MRC, and SCP. Eventually, the solution of the scheme is modeled as convex optimization. The objective function of the optimization problem is to maximize the transmission rate and the optimization variable is the strategy of pairing between the uplink spatial sub-channels of each user and the corresponding downlink spatial ones. The theorem of the arrangement inequalities is adopted to obtain the approximate closed-form solution of the optimal pairing for this convex optimization. Simulation results demonstrate that compared to the existing distributed space-time block coding and coherent combined schemes without SCP, the proposed max-rate SCP plus MRC algorithm achieves appreciable improvements in symbol error rate in medium and high signal-to-noise ratio regimes. The achievable performance gain is due to the use of maxrate SCP.
