Performance Analysis of Dual-Hop Fixed-Gain Relay Systems over Extended Generalized-K Fading Channels

In current cooperative communication systems, a relay terminal is very often used as intermediate node and may degrade or improve the overall system performance, depending on the power imbalance between the hops. In this paper, an approach to estimate the performance of dual-hop fixed-gain relay system when each hop is subjected to extended generalized-K fading is presented. New closed form expressions are derived for the cumulative distribution function, the outage probability, and the ergodic capacity. Moreover, the average symbol error probability for coherent and non-coherent modulation schemes is derived. The accuracy of analytic results is verified through computer simulations.