Asymptotic Performance Analysis of Amplify-and-Forward Cooperative Networks in a Nakagami-m Fading Environment

This letter analyzes the performance of repetition-based cooperative wireless networks using amplify-and forward relaying. The network consists of a source, R parallel relays, and a destination, and the channel coefficients are distributed as independent, non-identical, Nakagami-m. The approximated average symbol error rate (SER) is investigated. For sufficiently large SNR, this letter derives a close-form average SER when m is an integer. The simplicity of the asymptotic results provides valuable insights into the performance of cooperative networks and suggests means of optimizing them. We also use simulation to verify the analytical results. Results show that the derived error rates are tight approximations particularly at medium and high SNR.