In this paper we investigate the performance of a densely populated relay network as a massive distributed system. The distributed relaying nodes construct a large set of antennas providing the system with the advantages of both the relays and the massive MIMO systems. We apply large scale analysis to evaluate the performance of the dense relay network as a massive system, and show that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) increases almost linearly with the number of relaying devices in the case of amplify-and-forward relaying protocol. In the case of decode-and-forward relaying protocol, we show that the SNR is proportional to the square of number of relaying nodes. We then explore bounds and approximation for the deduced expression. Finally we maximize the energy efficiency of the proposed system by choosing the optimum number of relays.
