Error Analysis for Decode and Forward Cooperation In\ud Nakagami -m Fading For Arbitrary m

Bit error rate (BER) expressions for Decode and Forward(DF) cooperative systems, compared to amplify and\ud forward (AF) cooperation, are diffcult to evaluate, hence there is considerable interest in finding analytical\ud expressions for the BER for DF cooperative systems. In this thesis we obtain exact BER expression in DF\ud cooperative system for a ff-MRC receiver in Nakagami m fading for multiple relays where m need not be\ud integer. A different approach is proposed for a single relay.\ud For single relay, BER analysis is done by employing approximate statistics of a gamma conditionally\ud gaussian (CG) random variable (RV) (in the decision rule) obtained through the Loskot-Prony approximation.\ud Numerical results obtained using the analytical BER expressions are shown to closely follow the simulation\ud results, despite the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the gamma CGRV being a high signal to noise\ud ratio (SNR) approximation