On the computation of exact moments and performance metrics for multihop transparent weibull relay channels

In this paper, exact expressions are derived for the moments and performance metrics for a compound channel in multi-hop transmissions with transparent relays over independent and not necessarily identically distributed Weibull fading channels. Firstly, various moments are derived using characteristic function of second kind, based on Mellin transform. Using these moments, two useful statistical performance metrics named coefficient of variation and amount of fade are also derived for the end to end system. Moments and the metrics derived are in tractable compact forms and can be easily extended to other distributions also. These results can be directly applied in the study of outage probability and average bit error probability of such multi-hop transmissions. The proposed mathematical analysis is complimented by various numerical results, demonstrating the impact of the proposed expressions