On the receiver characterization of transparent multihop relay transmission systems

In this paper, issues pertaining to the receiver characterisation based on compound channel statistics and performance metrics for transparent multi hop relay transmissions are considered. Using Mellin transform, exact expressions are derived for the moments of independent cascaded Weibull distributions. The statistical performance metrics named coefficient of variation and average signal to noise ratio are derived for various number of hops so that these metrics can be used to fix the dynamic range of the detector unit. Moments and the metrics derived are of tractable compact forms and can be extended to other distributions easily. Computationally light moment based estimators for the parameters and order of cascade are also proposed for cascaded Weibull channels. The proposed mathematical analyses and estimators are complimented by various numerical and simulation results, demonstrating the impact of the derived expressions.