Outage probability of multihop transmission over Nakagami fading channels

We present a general analytical framework for the evaluation of the end-to-end outage probability of multihop wireless communication systems with nonregenerative relays over Nakagami fading channels. It is shown that the presented results can either be exact or tight lower bounds on the performance of these systems depending on the choice of the relay gain. More specifically, we obtain a closed-form expression for the moment generating function of the reciprocal of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and we then use this expression to calculate the outage probability via numerical inversion of the Laplace transform. Numerical examples show that regeneration is more crucial at low average SNR and for multihop systems with a large number of hops.