Precise Error Rate Analysis of Wireless Relay Networks

Abstract

A new method to analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance of two-hop multiple relay networks is presented in this paper. For this work, a flat fading channel is considered for exchanging signals between two wireless users which communicate with each other through set of bidirectional relays that operate as repeaters (amplify-and-forward). Each user adopts a relay selection scheme to choose the relay with the highest signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). The proposed method aims to reduce the analysis of the two-hop relay network to the BER analysis of one-hop (direct link) and this allows to improve the asymptotic BER (ABER) performance of two-hop. Thereby, the ABER would be more suitable for wide SNR range. From this ABER analysis, the exact BER (EBER) can be obtained directly and this gives a standard BER analysis for bidirectional relay networks. The analytic expressions for both ABER and EBER are derived and then confirmed by simulation results. It is found that the proposal gives low disparity calculation errors between ABER and EBER. It hence provides an accurate BER analysis for a bidirectional relay networks.