Impact of severe fading conditions on the AF cooperative system's outage probability
Jamaluddin Zakaria, Mohd Fadzli Mohd Salleh · 2017
A baseline single-relay amplify-and-forward cooperative system is proposed in this paper, where the source-to-destination (SD) and the source-to-relay links are subjected to Weibull fading while the relay-to-destination link experiences a Rician fading environment. The outage probability for the proposed system is determined by using the moment generating function (MGF) of the well-approximated instantaneous end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) with maximal ratio combining at the destination. Given that the exact end-to-end SNR is not tractable and a closed form for the particular MGF is difficult to find, we derive a tight lower-bound infinite series expression that converges rapidly after several terms. Furthermore, we ascertain from these results that under a certain amount of severe fading, the SD link can still provide an additional transmission diversity, which offers better performance than a system that definitely ignores the SD link.