Exact Error Analysis of Dual-Hop Fixed-Gain AF Relaying over Arbitrary Nakagami-m Fading

Closed-form error analysis of dual-hop fixed-gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying systems for transmissions over Nakagami fading channels has, so far, been tractable only with integer fading parameters. For the general Nakagami-m fading with arbitrary m values, the exact closed-form error analysis is more challenging. This paper goes toward solving this problem by deriving a unified error analysis framework that embraces several general modulation schemes. The obtained Error Probability (EP) expressions involve common functions which can be efficiently evaluated using standard numerical softwares. This work represents a significant improvement on previous contributions, not only by unifying the error probability expressions pertaining to dual-hop fixed gain relaying over integer Nakagami-m fading, but also by extending them to the general arbitrary Nakagami-m fading. Simulation results sustaining our analysis are provided, and the impacts of various parameters on the overall AF relaying system performance are investigated.