On ergodic capacity of cooperative non-regenerative relay networks in Rice fading environments

In this article, we have derived closed form moment generating function (MGF) of upper and lower bounds of the harmonic mean signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the two-hop cooperative amplify-and-forward (CAF) relay networks over Rice fading environments. The derived MGF formulas are then applied to the computation of ergodic capacity of optimal rate adaptation with constant power (ORA) and optimal joint power and rate adaptation (OPRA) source adaptive transmission policies over Rice fading channels. The above mathematical framework for the ergodic capacity allows us to investigate how the power assignment during different transmission phases, node placement (i.e., position of relay with respect to source and destination), fade distributions and dissimilar fading statistics across the distinct communication links affect the ergodic capacity, without imposing any restrictions on the fading parameters. Moreover, the ergodic capacity of ORA and OPRA source adaptive transmission policies have also been computed using new closed-form approximate MGF expression of two-hop CAF relay networks in our further attempt to reduce the computational complexity of the mean achievable rates for CAF relay networks. The proposed analytical frameworks have been validated by Monte Carlo simulations and are in good agreement.