Performance Analysis of Hybrid Cooperation in Asymmetric Fading Channels

—In this paper, symbol-error-rate (SER) performance analysis is provided for hybrid cooperation (HC) system in an asymmetric fading environment where the source-to-relay and the relay-to-destination channels experience independent Rayleigh/Rician and Rician/Rayleigh fading, respectively, while the direct channel link between the source and the destination is subject to Rayleigh fading. Unlike most existing relaying protocols which use amplify-and-forward (AF) or decodeand-forward (DF) protocol separately, the HC system takes advantage of both AF and DF protocols simultaneously. Based on the theoretical analysis, analytical expressions for the moment generating function (MGF) of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are derived and used to evaluate the SER performance of the HC system with M -ary phase shift keying ( M -PSK) modulation. Numerical and simulation results are presented to verify the theoretical analysis, where we also illustrate the impact of the Rician factors on system performance.