A theoretical characterization of the multihop wireless communications channel with diversity

This paper provides a theoretical characterization of the multihop wireless communications channel with diversity, wherein intermediate terminals relay information employing spatial diversity techniques. Two channel models are proposed and developed: one where each intermediate terminal combines, digitally decodes, and re-encodes the received signals from all preceding terminals and the other where each intermediate terminal simply combines and amplifies the received signals from all preceding terminals. 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 outperforming the decoded relaying model despite noise propagation