Multi-Hop Diversity Aided Multi-Hop Communications: A Cumulative Distribution Function Aware Approach

In this contribution, we propose and study a signal transmission scheme, namely the multihop diversity (MHD) scheme, conceived for transmission of information over multihop links (MHLs). During each time-slot (TS), the MHD scheme activates the specific hop transmission, whose signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) cumulative distribution function (CDF) gives the highest ordinate value amongst all the available hops. The next packet is then transmitted over the selected hop. Our studies show that this CDF-aware MHD scheme represents a generalized MHD scheme suitable for operation in the scenarios, where the different hops may have different distances, hence resulting in different average SNRs, and/or experience different types of fading. This MHD scheme is also capable of achieving the full diversity gain provided by the independent fading experienced by the different hops. In this paper, our attention is dedicated to the error probability, outage probability as well as to the achievable diversity order, when BPSK and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) are employed. Both the error probability and the outage probability of the MHLs are investigated for transmission over Nakagami-m fading channels, both of which demonstrate a significant diversity gain. Furthermore, the impact of the various system parameters on the achievable error probability and outage performance is characterized.