Outage Probability of Amplify-and-Forward Relay Networks Employing Maximum Ratio Combining and Transmit Antenna Selection in Heterogeneous Channels

In this paper, we present the end-to-end performance analysis of a dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relay system. In particular, the outage performance of a system which employs maximum ratio combining (MRC) and transmit antenna selection at the relay is analyzed. We consider systems which operate over heterogeneous channels, where the channels in the first and second hops can either follow a Rayleigh or Rician distribution. Closed-form expressions are derived for the outage probability in the high SNR regime. We further demonstrate through simulations that for a specific configuration, the Rice factor of the first channel does not have a significant impact on the end-to-end outage performance. We corroborate our derivations through simulation results.