On the performance of multi-antenna AF relaying systems over Nakagami-m fading channels

We analyze the performance of a dual-hop selection combining amplify-and-forward cooperative system over independent and identically distributed Nakagami-m fading channels, where multiple antennas are deployed in the receive side of relays and the destination. The outage probability, symbol error probability and average channel capacity are derived at arbitrary signal to noise ratios (SNRs). In order to obtain additional physical insights, we derive the above mentioned performance metrics in the high SNR regime; this enables us to parameterize the performance of the system in terms of diversity order and coding gain. Furthermore, some special cases of interest (e.g., Nakagami-0.5 and Rayleigh fading channels) are also studied. It is demonstrated that the analytical expressions, expressed via infinite series, match precisely with the Monte-Carlo simulations using only a small number of terms.