Performance analysis of opportunistic cooperative communication over Nakagami-m fading channels

In this paper, a dual-hop wireless cooperative network with opportunistic amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying is investigated over independent and non-identically distributed Nakagami-m fading channels. Due to the complicated form of the probability density function of the instantaneous dual-hop link signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the symbol error rate and outage probability expressions are difficult to obtain in closed form. Taking advantage of Maclaurin series expansion to simplify the probability density function of the output SNR, we present the tight approximate symbol error rate and outage probability expressions at medium and high SNR regions for opportunistic AF cooperative network. Computer simulation results reveal that the analysis expressions about symbol error rate and outage probability are accurate at medium and high SNR regions.