A theoretical characterization of the multihop wireless communications channel without diversity

This paper provides a theoretical characterization of the multihop wireless communications channel without diversity, wherein intermediate terminals relay information without employing spatial diversity techniques. Two channel models are proposed and developed: one where each intermediate terminal digitally decodes and re-encodes the received signal from the immediately preceding terminal and the other where each intermediate terminal simply amplifies the received signal from the immediately preceding terminal. These models are compared, through analysis and simulations, with the single-hop reference channel on the basis of probability of outage and probability of error. Both models achieve significant gains over the single-hop reference channel, with the amplified relaying model matching the performance of the decoded relaying model despite noise propagation.