Outage probability analysis of a two-hop Rayleigh-Lognormal relay network

Abstract

In next generation wireless technologies such as 5 G systems, heterogeneous relay networks are crucial to connect different wireless environments. In this paper, we analyze the end-to-end outage probability of two-hop relay networks over heterogeneous wireless networks. The setup incorporates Lognormal and Rayleigh distributions to model small-scale fading of some indoor and outdoor wireless channels, respectively. We derive an analytic expression for the outage probability of the amplify-and-forward transmission scheme over two-hop heterogeneous (Rayleigh-Lognormal) relay networks. In particular, we derive closed-form expressions for lower and upper bounds on the end-to-end outage probability. Numerical results validate the tightness of the proposed bounds. We also provide quantitative comparisons of the outage performance of two-hop relay networks in Rayleigh-Lognormal environments and the outage performance of two-hop relay networks in Rayleigh-Rayleigh fading. Numerical examples show that the former has lower outage probability over the entire signal-to-noise ratio range.