Accuracy of Harmonic Mean Approximation in Performance Analysis of Multihop Amplify-and-Forward Relaying
Aydin Behnad, Xianbin Wang · IEEE Wireless Communications Letters · 2014
The accuracy of the harmonic mean approximation (HMA) of the exact end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in multihop amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying systems is analyzed. A lower bound for the exact end-to-end SNR is obtained as a function of the HMA. It is shown that HMA overestimates the exact value but no more than 0.5, regardless of the number of hops and the fading model being used. Then, performance bounds for multihop AF relaying systems, including upper and lower bounds for the exact outage probability, average symbol error probability, and ergodic capacity, are obtained using HMA.