Performance Bounds for AF Multi-Hop Relaying over Nakagami Fading

This paper presents a new upper bound on the end-to- end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of channel-assisted amplify-and-forward (AF) multi-hop relay networks. The harmonic mean of the minimum of the first P >= 0 hop SNRs and the minimum of the remaining hop SNRs forms the new bound. Closed-form expressions are derived for the cumulative distribution function and the moment generating function of this SNR upper bound for independent and non-identically distributed Rayleigh, and independent and identically distributed Nakagami-m fading, where m is an integer. The outage probability and the average symbol error rate bounds are also derived. Our proposed bounds are compared against the existing bounds.