Dual-hop relaying communications over generalized-K (KG) fading channels

In this paper, a study on the end-to-end performance of dual-hop non-regenerative relaying over independent generalized-K (KG) fading channels is presented. Using a suitable upper bound for the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), novel closed-form expressions for the cumulative distribution function (CDF), probability density function (PDF) and the moments of this bounded SNR are derived. These results can be afterwards used to obtain important performance metrics of the considered system such as the outage probability and the error performance of digital modulation schemes. In the case of independent but non-necessarily identical fading channels, lower bounds for the average bit error probability (ABEP) for different modulation schemes are determined by using the Padé approximants method. For the case of identical fading channels, closed-form lower bounds for the ABEP are derived. Various numerical and computer simulation results illustrate the proposed analysis.