Performance analysis of cooperative network over Nakagami and Rician fading channels

This paper presents an analysis on the performance of single‐relay and multiple fixed‐relay cooperative network. The relay nodes operate in amplify‐and‐forward (AF) mode and transmit the signal through orthogonal channels. We consider maximal‐ratio combining at the destination to get the spatial diversity by adding the received signals coherently. The closed‐form moment‐generating function (MGF) for the total equivalent signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) is derived. The exact expressions of symbol‐error rate, outage capacity, and outage probability are obtained using the closed‐form MGF for single‐relay and multiple‐relay cooperative network with M‐ary phase shift keying (M‐PSK) and M‐ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M‐QAM) over independent and non‐identical Nakagami‐m channels and Rician fading channels. The approximated closed‐form expression of ergodic capacity is derived for both Nakagami‐m and Rician fading channels. The performance of the system is analyzed at various relay locations. The theoretical results are then compared with the simulation results obtained for binary PSK, quadrature PSK, and 16‐QAM modulation schemes to verify the analysis. Here, the expressions derived can be easily and more efficiently used to compute the performance parameters than doing Monte Carlo simulations. It is shown that cooperation is significant only for low K values for Rician by plotting cooperation gain versus K. The results show that the cooperative network performs best when the relay is located in the middle of source to destination link, at lower SNR values, and the performance of the system is worst if the relay is located closer to the source than to the destination. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.