Unified Exact Performance Analysis of Two-Hop Amplify-and-Forward Relaying in Nakagami Fading

We present a general two-parameter received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) model for two-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying. It encompasses AF schemes that select the relay gain as the reciprocal of a linear combination of the channel gain and the noise power of the incoming link, including all channel-noise-assisted, channel-assisted, and blind relay schemes. Moreover, the model is flexible enough to represent independent source and relay power allocations. A unified performance analysis is then developed for AF relaying over independent but nonidentically distributed Nakagami-m faded links, where m is an integer. Exact analytical expressions are derived for the cumulative-distribution function (cdf), probability density function (pdf), and moment-generating function (mgf) of the received SNR. Monte Carlo simulation results are provided to verify the results.