Performance analysis of cooperative diversity protocols for multihop wireless networks

This paper investigates two-phase cooperative diversity protocols for multihop wireless networks over generalized fading environments. We analyze their regenerative outage probability in term of symmetrical and asymmetrical network configurations. Their generalized diversity order expressions are derived at high average signal-to-noise ratio (ASNR). The theoretical and simulation results show that the cooperative systems can offer the full diversity order at some given manners. However, the generalized diversity order is determined by the sum of the two cooperative route diversities, not the total number of the cooperative nodes, where the smaller diversity order in two-hop route plays an important role.