Cooperative mobile-to-mobile communications over double Nakagami- <i>m</i> fading channels

Abstract

Double Nakagami-m fading model can be used to provide a realistic description of the mobile-to-mobile (M2M) channel. The moment generating function (MGF)-based approach is used to derive the symbol error probability (SEP) expressions for the multiple-mobile-relay-based M2M system. Under the consideration of better performance and lower complexity, both decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) protocols are addressed in this study. For adaptive DF (ADF) relaying, the asymptotic SEP at high signal-to-noise ratio regime in addition to the exact SEP formulations are derived. Furthermore, the impacts of channel estimation error for the insight of non-ideal channel estimation are analysed. For fixed-gain AF (FAF) relaying, the authors present approximate SEP and asymptotic SEP to indicate the cooperative gain. For L mobile relays and under the assumption of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) source–relay channels and i.i.d relay–destination channels, it is shown in this paper that asymptotic diversity orders of L×min(mRD,1, mRD,2)+min(mSD,1, mSD,2) and L×min(mSR,1, mSR,2, mRD,1, mRD,2)+min(mSD,1, mSD,2) can be achieved for ADF-M2M and FAF-M2M schemes, respectively. Simulations are performed to verify the analytical results.