General Decode-and-Forward Cooperative Relaying with Co-Channel Interference in Shadowed Nakagami Fading Channels

General multi-branch multi-hop (MBMH) cooperative diversity systems with selection decode-and-forward (DF) relays are investigated on non-identical shadowed Nakagami-m fading channels in the presence of an arbitrary number of non-identical co-channel interferers. This paper presents closed-form expressions for the outage probability, the average symbol error probability, and the probability density function of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio of the selection DF MBMH cooperative relaying system. The results of the paper show that outage and error performance improvements against shadowing stem from the number of branches rather than the number of hops for a fixed number of relays. The results also show that the performance of the selection DF MBMH cooperative relaying system is more vulnerable when co-channel interferers are closer to the destination than when they are closer to the relays. This analysis is verified by Monte Carlo simulations.