Performance Analysis of Multi-Hop Multi-Branch Amplify-and-Forward Cooperative Communication Over Rician Fading Channels

Abstract

Performance of multi-hop multi-branch amplify and forward (AF) cooperative communication over Rician fading channels is presented in this paper by a novel analysis method. Rician distribution is used to analyze the system because this channel model is useful in aerospace wireless communication channels. We derive an asymptotic expression for the statistics of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the system under study with well-known moment-generating function (MGF)-based approach with maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme. Moreover, for comparative analysis in different branches and hops, outage probability and symbol error ratio are derived. Finally, numerical simulation results are provided to confirm the theoretical results. These results are presented to illustrate the considerable performance improvement achieved by the increasing number of branches and hops.