Performance analysis of incremental relaying for amplify-and-forward cooperative networks in Nakagami-m channels

Compared with the regular cooperative diversity networks, incremental relaying cooperative diversity make more efficient use of the channel resources. In this paper, we analyze the end-to-end performance of incremental relaying for amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative diversity networks over independent and identical distributed (i.i.d.) flat Nakagami-m fading channels. Tight lower bounds closed-form expressions for the bit error rate (BER) and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) outage probability are given. Numerical investigation shows that the analytic result makes an exact match with the simulation, and system performances of different cases are evaluated and compared.