Outage Probability of Multi-hop Relay Systems in Various Fading Channels

In this paper we study the end-to-end outage performance of multihop cooperative communication systems employing amplify and forward (AaF) relaying under Rayleigh, Nakagami, Rician and Weibull fading channels. The outage probability performances of multi-hop systems with fixed gain and variable gain relays is compared. The outage probability for multi-hop systems under Rayleigh, Nakagami and Weibull fading models can be determined only by combining analytical results with numerical integration techniques. We show that fixed gain system has a better outage performance compared to the variable gain for all fading scenarios. This performance gap increases by increasing the number of hops.