Theoretical FER Performance of Multi-Hop Wireless Cooperative Networks Using Transmit Diversity

Multi-hop relaying can extend communication range using limited transmit power, and improve area spectral efficiency. However, they might cause considerable degradation of end-to-end error performance due to error accumulation. Cooperative relaying, in which multiple stations forward the received signal using transmit diversity techniques, can recover the errors unless all the relay stations do not receive the signal correctly, and improve the transmission performance. In this paper, the FER performance of multi-hop cooperative networks is analyzed by using state transition. Theoretical analysis reveals that the FER performance can be kept almost constant, or even improved with increasing the number of hops. The computer simulation results closely agree with the analysis.