Error Rate and Power Allocation Analysis of Regenerative Networks Over Generalized Fading Channels

Abstract

Cooperative communication has been shown to provide significant increase of transmission reliability and network capacity while expanding coverage in cellular networks. The present work is devoted to the investigation of the end-to-end performance and power allocation of a maximum-ratio-combining based regenerative multi-relay cooperative network over non-homogeneous scattering environment, which is the realistic case in many practical wireless communication scenarios. Novel analytic expressions are derived for the end-to-end symbol-error-rate of both M-ary phase-shift keying and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation over independent and non-identically distributed generalized fading channels are given by exact analytic expressions that involve the Lauricella function and can be readily evaluated with the aid of a proposed computing algorithm. Simple analytic expressions are also derived for the corresponding symbol-error-rate at asymptotically high signal-to-noise ratios. The derived expressions are corroborated with respective results from computer simulations and are subsequently employed in formulating a sum-power optimization problem that enhances the system performance under total sum-power constraint within the multi-relay cooperative system. It is also shown that asymptotically optimum power allocation provides substantial performance gains over the corresponding equal power allocation, particularly, when the source-relay and relay-destination paths are highly unbalanced.