Performance analysis of the dual-hop asymmetric fading channel

In real wireless communication environments, it is highly likely that different channels associated with a relay network could experience different fading phenomena. In this paper, we investigate the end-to-end performance of a dual-hop fixed gain relaying system when the source-relay and the relay-destination channels experience Rayleigh/Rician and Rician/Rayleigh fading scenarios respectively. Analytical expressions for the cumulative distribution function of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio are derived and used to evaluate the outage probability and the average bit error probability of M-QAM modulations. Numerical and simulation results are presented to illustrate the impact of the Rician factor on the end-to-end performance. Furthermore, these results confirm that the system exhibits an improved performance in a Rician/Rayleigh (source-relay link/relay-destination link) environment compared to a Rayleigh/Rician environment.