Performance Analysis of Incremental Relaying Transmission with Adaptive QAM over Nakagami-m Fading Channels

Cooperative network is a way to make a reliable communication by adding a relay between the source and the destination. The incremental relaying based on the amplify-and-forward transmission was introduced in (Laneman et al., 2004) as an efficient relaying protocol. In this paper, we provide the performance analysis of incremental relaying with adaptive QAM transmission over the independent, non-identically distributed Nakagami-m fading channels. By using an upper bound on the output signal-to-noise ratio, the average spectral efficiency, average bit error rate and outage probability of our proposed system are derived. Our analytical-based numerical results are validated by some computer-based simulations.