Performance evaluation of synthetic waveguide communication in a Nakagami-m fading environment

We examine the scenario, where two communicants use some limited number of relay, units to propagate messages to one another across a Nakagami-m fading environment. Each autonomous relay unit has omnidirectional transmit/receive capability to establish power limited communication links with neighboring relay units. The outage probability is derived for various "synthetic waveguide" configurations, which introduce spatial diversity. As signal fading increases, such spatial diversity provides a dramatic improvement in performance over the nominal "bucket brigade" configuration of placing the relay units at uniform spacing along the line intersecting the communicants.