On the Performance Analysis of Multi-Hop Cooperative Relay Networks over Generalized-K Fading Channels

This letter analyzes an amplify-and-forward (AF) transmission based multi-hop cooperative relay network (MCRN) over Generalized-K fading channels. In this letter, highly simplified, novel asymptotic expressions for the average symbol error rate and the outage probability of MCRNs over Generalized-K fading channels (with arbitrary fading parameters) are presented. Both theoretical analysis and simulations explicitly reveal that for MCRNs over Generalized-K fading channels, a diversity order of 2k is achieved when shadowing is more severe than fading and a diversity order of 2m is achieved when fading is more severe than shadowing (where k and m represent the Generalized-K distribution shape parameters).