Selection combining of two amplify-forward relay branches with individual links experiencing Nakagami fading

Abstract

Relay based communication has gained considerable importance in the recent years. In this paper we find out the end- to-end statistics of a two hop non-regenerative relay branch, with each hop being Nakagami-m distributed. A closed form expression for the statistics of the signal envelope at the output of a selection combiner in the destination node is also derived and compared with the simulation results. These statistics are useful in understanding the system performance in terms of bit error rate and outage probability.