Moments-based analysis of dual-hop amplify-and-forward relaying communications systems over generalised fading channels

The authors present an alternative moments-based approach for the performance analysis of dual-hop relaying communications systems over generalised fading channels. A unified analytical approach for the computation of the nth moment of the harmonic mean of N ⩾ 2 arbitrarily distributed random variables (RVs) is proposed. On the basis of this statistical result, we analyse the outage and the average error rate performance of dual-hop cooperative wireless systems employing amplify-and-forward (AF) relays. Moreover, our newly derived results can be applied to evaluate the average sum rate of AF relaying systems. Extensive numerical and simulation results are presented to substantiate the proposed analysis.