Performance analysis of amplify-forward relay in mixed Nakagami-m and Rician fading channels

The performance of a dual-hop amplify-and forward relay system is analyzed in terms of outage probability and average symbol error rate. The source-relay and relay-destination channels experience mixed fading distributions namely, Rician and Nakagami-m. Analytical expressions for Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) and Probability Density Function (PDF) of end-end signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) are derived and confirmed with Monte-Carlo simulation. Approximate lower bound for outage probability is also derived, which becomes tight at high SNR values. The expressions are given in terms of infinite sum series of modified Bessel function, which converges after finite iterations. The derived expressions are valid for different fading scenarios (depending on m factor), and specialize to previously published results for m = 1.