On the performance of fixed-gain amplify-and-forward dual-hop relay systems with beamforming under k ? ? shadowed fading

Modern cooperative telecommunication networks are currently utilizing a relay terminal, which is frequently exploited as an intermediate stage. This technique is vitally significant for the sake of performance enhancement and coverage extension with no further increment of the transmitted RF power. These benifits can be further improved by introducing multiple antennas at both source and destination nodes. In this paper, a two-hop multi-antenna wireless transmission system which is equipped with a fixed-gain aided amplify and forward relay node is investigated. A complete analytical framework to estimate the end-to-end (e2e) performance when both the source-relay and relay-destination links are subjected to independent but non-identical (i.n.i.d) k - μ shadowed fading is derived. More specifically, new accurate and easy to compute mathematical expressions, using an accurate form of the e2e signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) density function, are derived for several fundamental performance metrics that fully describe the contemplated system, namely, the outage probability (Pout), the moment generating function (MGF), and the average symbol error probability (ASEP) for a single two-hop transmission system. This unified analytical framework is obtained in terms of well-known and easily computable functions. Finally, all the analytical results for the antecedent performance descriptors are verified through computer simulations in the respect of accuracy.