Performance of the dual-hop decode and forward relaying systems over Nakagami-m fading channels

A closed-form expression is derived for the probability density function (PDF) of the instantaneous received end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relaying systems over Nakagami-m fading channel. The derived expression is used to evaluate the average symbol error probability for different coherent modulation techniques over this fading channel. Moreover, an expression for the outage probability is derived for this channel model. All the derived expressions are in closed forms and reduce to the well-known fading channel distributions. The effects of fading parameters on the system performance were studied. It is shown that an increase in the Nakagami-m parameter gives improvement in the system performance.