Performance study of decode and forward based multi-hop relaying in wireless networks over extended generalized-K fading channels

This paper presents and evaluates the performance of wireless networks that utilize the decode-and-forward relay. The performance of the aforementioned relaying scheme operating over Extended Generalized-K (EGK) composite fading channels. One important feature of the EGK fading model is its versatility in the sense of including many types of the popular fading models as particular cases. In addition, the EGK fading model can be considered as a convenient candidate to characterize complicated wireless channels in which both multipath fading and shadowed phenomena simultaneously exists. To this effect, new exact and easy to compute formulas for several performance metrics are derived. More specifically, new and exact-form mathematical formulas are derived for the cumulative distribution function (CDF), the generalized moments of the overall end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the outage probability (P
_out
), the ergodic capacity (C
_Ergodic
), the moment generating function (MGF), and the average error probability (AEP) for different modulation schemes. Moreover, we carried out a series of computer simulation experiments in order to testify the accuracy of the derived framework. Finally, we discussed the impact of different parameters including fading/shadowing parameters, transmitted power and the number of hops on the derived expressions.