Outage Probability and Bit Error Rate of the Amplify-and-Forward Relay Network

In this paper, we investigate the outage probability and bit error rate performance of the amplify-and forward relay network. The system model we consider has three nodes, with one antenna at the transmit end, one antenna at relay node, and multiple antennas at the receive end where maximal ratio combining is employed. In the Rayleigh fading channel, we derive closed-form upper and lower bounds of the outage probability and bit error rate of the system instead of the expressions of exact values due to considerable complexity. Then we proceed to validate our analytical results through link-level simulations. The simulation results reveal that our theoretical analysis agree well with link-level simulation results, thus our results greatly contributes to the simplification of calculating outage probability and bit error rate of our system.