Performance analysis of best-path selection scheme for multi-hop amplify-and-forward relaying

This letter derives closed-form expressions for the error probability, capacity outage and channel capacity for the best-path selection amplify-and-forward technique over non-identical Rayleigh fading channels. In particular, this letter derives closed-form expressions for the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the probability density function (PDF) of the output signal-to-noise (SNR) at the destination. We use these statistics to obtain the expressions of the error probability, capacity outage and channel capacity. Furthermore, closed-form expressions for some of the statistics of the output SNR such as the SNR moments and the amount of fading have been determined. Simulation results are used to verify the analytical results. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.