On the Performance of Two-Hop Amplify and Forward Relay Networks with Beamforming over Rayleigh-Rician Fading Channels

In this paper, the performance of beamforming in two-hop relay networks with Rayleigh-Rician asymmetric fading channels is investigated. This network consists of a relay node equipped with a single antenna, a source and a destination node both equipped with multiple antennas. The first and the second hop are respectively subjected to Rayleigh and Rician fading. Transmit beamforming and receive beamforming (or named MRC) are implemented at source and destination nodes, respectively. Analytical expressions for outage probability and average symbol error rate (SER) are derived in both infiniteseries form and simple asymptotic results. The infinite-series representation expressions are shown to converge rapidly of a few terms for high accuracy and the simple asymptotic results the system can achieve a diversity order of min(Nt,Nr), where Nt, Nr denote the number of antenna at source and destination node, respectively. Monte Carlo simulation is performed to verify the proposed analytical results.