Symbol Error Rate of MPSK with Multihop Regenerative Relays

In this paper, we investigate multihop communication systems with regenerative relays over Nakagami fading channels and propose a simple approach for performance evaluation. Relaying terminals and destination terminal are assumed to adopt coherent detection. Based on the characteristic of M-ary Phase-Shift Keying (MPSK) constellation modulation signals, symbol error rate (SER) expressions are derived for N hops. Near-Optimal power allocation (N-OPA) strategy is also analyzed to further improve performance for multihop with single antenna per terminal. Then, we extend single terminal to multiple terminals in each relaying tier to form virtual antenna arrays (VAAs). Hence, distributed space-time block codes can be deployed in multihop wireless networks. Finally, some numerical results are provided to prove our theoretical analysis.