Error performance analysis of cooperative systems with receiver diversity: Effect of shadowing in source-destination link

In this paper, a cooperative system with more than one receive antenna at relay and destination is considered. Amplify and forward method is used at the relay and maximal ratio combiners are employed at the receivers. It is assumed that source-relay and relay-destination channels have Nakagami-m fading and source-destination channels have composite shadowing/fading modeled by Generalized-K distribution. The bit error performance of the system under consideration is analyzed based on the moment generating function technique and the analytical results are verified by computer simulations.