Diversity analysis of smart relaying over Nakagami and Hoyt generalised fading channels

Signal transmission with the help of relay(s) in wireless networks can achieve spatial diversity without the need of having multiple antennas at the source and/or destination. Among various signal processing techniques proposed for the relays, the adaptive decode-and-forward (DF) relaying strategy, recently proposed by Wang et al. and generally referred to as smart relaying, has been shown to achieve the maximal spatial diversity even when imperfect detection is committed at the relays. The work by Wang et al., however, only considers Rayleigh fading channels. This paper extends the diversity analysis of the smart relaying technique to the important Nakagami and Hoyt generalised fading channels. Performance analysis proves that, at high signal-to-noise ratio, the maximal diversity order achieved by the smart relaying system under the Nakagami channel is m _SD+min(m _SR, m _RD}, where m _SR, m _RD and m _SD are the fading figures of the source-relay (S-R), relay-destination (R-D) and source-destination (S-D) links. Under the Hoyt fading channel, the diversity order is 2. The obtained results on the diversity order are shown to be insensitive to the quality of the R-D feedback channel.