Performance analysis of decode-and-forward multi-hop transmission for vehicular networks

In this paper, we consider a multi-hop vehicular network in which the transmitted signal propagates through sequential vehicle hops to arrive to the destination vehicle. We assume doubly-selective channels and employ precoding to take advantage of the underlying temporal and multipath diversities. Our performance analysis through pairwise error probability derivation shows that, via proper precoding, the precoded system is able to extract maximum available diversity in time (through Doppler diversity) and frequency (through multipath diversity) dimensions. Numerical results are further provided to confirm the analytical derivations and provide insight into the error rate performance.