Performance Analysis of Relay-Assisted Cooperative Systems in Correlated Fading Channels

In this paper, the effect of fading correlation at the receiving elements of a linear antenna array in a relay-assisted cooperative single-input multiple-output (SIMO) system has been investigated over flat Rayleigh fading channels. Considering a model of local scatterer around the source and relay nodes and uniform angle of arrival (AOA) distribution, the spatial cross-correlation analysis is presented and extensive simulation studies are performed to determine the envelope correlation as a function of antenna spacing, mean AOA and angular spread. Error performance analysis for coherent binary and quaternary modulations are presented for fixed-gain amplify-and-forward (AF) and fixed decode-and-forward (DF) relaying with dual diversity maximal-ratio combiner (MRC) receiver array. Error probability in terms of bit error probability (BEP) and symbol error probability (SEP) is evaluated to study the effect of relevant parameters on the correlation performance. The presented results establish the fact that fixed DF relay network performs relatively well than fixed-gain AF relaying. Superior performance of dual-hop cooperative SIMO system over conventional single-hop SIMO system has also been observed.