Performance analysis of MIMO based cooperative communication in κ-μ fading channels

Cooperative communication and relay selection are techniques that increase the quality of service (QoS) in wireless communication system. In this paper, we investigate the symbol error rate (SER) performance of cooperative decode-and-forward (DF) relaying in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system over independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) κ-μ fading channel environment for M-ary phase shift keying (MPSK) and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) schemes. According to DF relaying relay nodes forward the signal received from source to destination only if it is able to decode source signal correctly. The system under consideration is such that every relay may have different number of receive antennas. We apply Orthogonal Space Time Block Coding (OSTBC) scheme at transmit antennas of source and relays. The received signals at the relays and destination are combined using maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme. Finally, we derive the expression for SER performance using moment generating function (MGF) based approach. Through close agreement of the results form Monte Carlo simulations, the analytical results have been validated.