On the performance of a dual-hop network with a mobile relay in a Nakagami fading environment

High speed trains are becoming a popular means of transportation all over the world, such that it is necessary to develop and deploy an infrastructure to provide broadband to passengers on the train. However, there are several challenges to high speed communication systems including the fact that channel conditions change drastically hindering channel estimation accuracy and overall system performance, which leads to link failure. Cooperative relaying is one of the novel schemes used in wireless communication to improve throughput and system performance. In this paper, we propose a general analytical approach to evaluate the performance of a dual-hop network with a fixed relay on a train carriage in a Nakagami-m fading environment. The relay is assumed to employ either decode-and-forward (DF) or amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying scheme. Both, the relay and destination nodes are assumed to be mobile and follow the Random direction (RD) mobility model. Under this setting, we derive exact expressions for outage probability and average bit error probability (ABEP). The derived analytical results are general and applicable to several network topology dimensions, fading conditions, and digital modulation schemes. The analytical results are verified by Monte Carlo simulations.