SER of Multi-hop Decode and Forward Cooperative Communications under Rayleigh Fading Channel

In this paper, we present the performance analysis of multi-hop decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative communications under Rayleigh fading channel. The source, multiple relays and destination nodes are equipped with single antenna transceiver while the transmission channels are assumed to be mutually independent. A time-division channel allocation scheme is occupied in order to realize orthogonal channelization, therefore no inter-relay interference is considered in the system model. The compact derivation form of the end-to-end signal to noise ratio (SNR) probability density function (pdf) is analyzed. We also derived the symbol error rate (SER) of M-ary phase shift keying (MPSK) and outage probability under slow flat Rayleigh fading. In this work, we study the probability of SNR gain of multi-hop DF system over the single-hop system. The numerical results show that decreasing the threshold SNR and increasing the number of hops (N) yields lower the outage probability of the system. It is obvious that the performance of the multi-hop system with the improvement of the average BER is proportional to the number of hop. Finally, probability of SNR gain can be achieved by increasing number of hops.