  Despite the deleterious effect of hardware impairments on communication
systems, most prior works have not investigated their impact on widely used
relay systems. Most importantly, the application of inexpensive transceivers,
being prone to hardware impairments, is the most cost-efficient way for the
implementation of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems.
Consequently, the direction of this paper is towards the investigation of the
impact of hardware impairments on MIMO relay networks with large number of
antennas. Specifically, we obtain the general expression for the ergodic
capacity of dual-hop (DH) amplify-and-forward (AF) relay systems. Next, given
the advantages of the free probability (FP) theory with comparison to other
known techniques in the area of large random matrix theory, we pursue a large
limit analysis in terms of number of antennas and users by shedding light to
the behavior of relay systems inflicted by hardware impairments.
