Diversity in relaying protocols with amplify and forward

We examine a network consisting of one source, one destination and two amplifying and forwarding relays and consider a scenario in which destination and relays can have various processing limitations. For all possible diversity combining schemes at the relays and at the destination, we find diversity order results analytically and confirm our findings through numerical calculations of bit error rate (BER) versus signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) curves. We compare our results with direct transmission, well known transmit diversity methods and traditional multihop transmission and conclude that diversity reception in multihop networks provides the lowest error rate.