Performance of cooperative diversity on correlated dual-hop channels with an amplify-and-forward relay over Rayleigh fading environments

The performance of the transmission through dual-hop fading channels with a correlation between the first and second hops is evaluated, where an amplify-and-forward relay over Rayleigh fading environments is used. The corresponding outage probability and bit error probability (BEP) of cooperative selection combining (SC) and maximal-ratio combining (MRC) are derived. For cooperative diversity, the source-to-relay-to-destination (S-R-D) dual-hop path and source-to-destination (S-D) direct path are considered. Numerical results are presented to show the impact of the correlation on the receiver performance. Based on the numerical result, the correlation between the source-to-relay (S-R) and relay-to-destination (R-D) channels will degrade the receiver performance.