Maximal ratio combining in N dual-hop Nakagami-m faded relay branches

In recent years relay based communication has gained attention of researchers and the scientific community. In this paper the source-to-destination statistics of a two hop amplify-forward relay branch, with the channel fading statistics of each hop being Nakagami-m distributed has been evaluated. The expression for the statistics of the signal envelope at the output of a maximal ratio combiner in the destination node of a N-path dual-hop relay braches is derived and compared with the simulation results. The statistics are helpful in evaluating the performance of systems using co-operative dual hop relaying and employing maximal ratio combining at the receiver terminal.