“…On one hand, from the MIMO perspective, V-MIMO systems can be designed to achieve diversity gains [13], [16], [18]- [21], multiplexing gains [14], [15], and/or beamforming gains [22], [23] using various distributed coding and signal processing techniques. Moreover, the MIMO signaling can be designed to treat cooperative relays in a VAA in a non-selective [1], [2], [8], [13], [20] or selective [9], [10], [14] fashion. On the other hand, from the relay perspective, V-MIMO systems can adopt either amplify-and-forward (AF) [8], [9], [22]- [24], decode-and-forward (DF) [2], [3], [18], [25], compress-andforward (CF) [26], [27], or hybrid [11] schemes to complete a transmission in two-hops [1], [8], [9] or multi-hops [2], [3], [14], [18], [20], [25], [28].…”