Performance Analysis of Amplify-and-Forward Relay Systems with Interference-Limited Destination in Various Rician Fading Channels

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a dual-hop fixed-gain amplify-and-forward relay system in the presence of co-channel interference at the destination node. Different fading scenarios for the desired user and interferers' channels are assumed in this study. We consider the Rician/Nakagami- $$m$$ m , the Rician/Rician, and the Nakagami- $$m$$ m /Rician fading environments. In our analysis, we derive accurate approximations for the outage probability and symbol error probability (SEP) of the considered scenarios. The generic independent non-identically distributed (i.n.d.) case of interferers' channels is considered for the Rician/Nakagami- $$m$$ m scenario; whereas, the independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) case is studied for the Rician/Rician and the Nakagami- $$m$$ m /Rician environments. Furthermore, to get more insights on the considered systems, high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) asymptotic analysis of the outage probability and SEP is derived for special cases of the considered fading scenarios. Monte-Carlo simulations and numerical examples are presented in order to validate the analytical and asymptotic results and to illustrate the effect of interference and other system parameters on the system performance. Results show that the different fading models of interferers' channels have the same diversity order and that the interference degrades the system performance by only reducing the coding gain. Furthermore, findings show that the case where the fading parameter of the desired user first hop channel is better than that of the second hop gives better performance compared to the vise versa case, especially, at low SNR values; whereas, both cases almost behave the same at high SNR values where the performance of the system is dominated by the interference affecting the worst link. Finally, results show the big gap in system performance due to approximating the Rician fading distribution with the Nakagami- $$m$$ m distribution which is an indication on the inaccuracy of making such approximations in systems like the considered.