Performance analysis of a piecewise-and-forward relay network on Rayleigh fading channels

In this paper, we analyse the performance of a cooperative communication network with multiple piecewise-and-forward (PF) relays on Rayleigh fading channels taking the random nature of the channel variations into account. In particular, the probability density function (PDF) of the received signals at the destination of the considered multiple PF relay network is derived for the case of Rayleigh fading. The PDF is then used to support the maximum likelihood detection at the destination. Simulation results are provide to compare the bit error rate (BER) performance of the PF protocol in a multiple relay network with the performance of the amplify-and-forward (AF), decode-and-forward (DF), and estimate-and-forward (EF) protocols on Rayleigh fading as well as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. The results indicate that the PF protocol outperforms the EF protocol in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime while it is slightly inferior to the EF protocol for high SNR. This behavior is more pronounced over Rayleigh fading compared to AWGN.