Efficient Analysis of the Ergodic Capacity of Cooperative Non-regenerative Relay Networks over Generalized Fading Channels

In this paper, we proposed a novel efficient method of analyzing the ergodic channel capacity of the cooperative amplify-and-forward (CAF) relay system. This is accomplished by employing a very tight approximate moment generating function (MGF) of end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio of 2-hop multi-relay system, which is In this paper, we proposed a novel efficient method of analyzing the ergodic channel capacity of the cooperative amplify-and-forward (CAF) relay system. This is accomplished by employing a very tight approximate moment applicable to myriad of fading environments including mixed and composite fading channels. Three distinct adaptive source transmission policies were considered in our analysis namely: (i) constant power with optimal rate adaptation (ORA); (ii) optimal joint power and rate adaptation (OPRA); and (iii) fixed rate with truncated channel inversion (TCIFR). The proposed frame work based on the novel approximate MGF method is sufficiently general to encapsulate all types of fading environments (especially for the analysis of the mixed fading case)and provides significant advantage to model wireless system for mixed and composite fading channel. In addition to simplifying computation complexity of ergodic capacity for CAF relaying schemes treated in literature, we also derive closed form expressions for the above three adaptive source transmission policies under Nakagami-m fading with i.n.d statistics. The accuracy of our proposed method has been validated with existing MGF expressions that are readily available for specific fading environments in terms of bounds, and via Monte Carlo simulations.