This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts
for publication in the IEEE Globecom 2011 proceedings.
Amplify-and-Forward Multihop Relaying With
Adaptive M -QAM in Nakagami-m Fading
Norman C. Beaulieu, Fellow, IEEE∗ , Golnaz Farhadi, and Yunfei Chen, Senior Member, IEEE‡
∗
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada. E-mail: beaulieu@ece.ualberta.ca
†
Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, USA. Email: gfarhadi@stanford.edu
‡
School of Engineering, University of Warwick, UK. E-mail: Yunfei.Chen@warwick.ac.uk
Abstract—An amplify-and-forward (AF) multihop relaying
system employing constant-power rate-adaptive M -QAM trans-
mission is investigated. Accurate expressions for performance
evaluation in Nakagami-m fading of adaptive continuous rate
(ACR) and adaptive discrete rate (ADR) M -QAM are obtained.
The analysis is based on a new approximation for the instanta-
neous end-to-end received SNR in the form of a scaled version
of the harmonic mean of the individual per-hop SNRs. The
scaling factor is determined based on the average link SNRs.
Performance results evaluated using the proposed approximation
are more accurate than the performance bounds obtained using
the conventional harmonic-mean-based upper bound on the
instantaneous received SNR, even though they are obtained with
the same computational complexity. Numerical results show that
the approximate performance results are very close to the exact
results especially in small SNR regimes and for larger values
of the Nakagami parameter. It is shown that the ACR QAM
achieves an average spectral efficiency within a certain distance
of the Shannon limit. The ADR QAM achieves smaller bit error
rates than the target bit error rate but at the expense of an
additional penalty on the average spectral efficiency, especially
for smaller numbers of region boundaries.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Multihop relaying is a promising technique for application
in current and future wireless networks for saving transmitter
power and providing broader coverage. Amplify-and-forward
(AF) is a simple relaying scheme in which each relay simply
amplifies the signal it receives and then forwards to its next
terminal.
The performance of AF multihop systems has been ex-
tensively studied in the literature. The outage and bit error
probabilities of an AF dual-hop system over Rayleigh fading
channels were evaluated in [1]. A numerical method was pro-
posed in [2] to evaluate the outage probability in Nakagami-
m fading of an AF multihop system. In [3], performance
bounds on the outages and error probabilities of AF multihop
transmission systems over Nakagami-m fading channels were
obtained. Recently, closed-form finite integral expressions for
evaluation of the error probability, outage probability and
ergodic capacity were derived in [4], [5] using the moment
generating function (MGF) and characteristic function (CHF)
of the inverse of the instantaneous received SNR.
While most of the papers on multihop relaying consider
fixed rate and fixed power transmission [1]-[4], adaptive
transmission has been shown to yield better channel utilization
[5]. In [5], the Shannon capacities of different source-adaptive
978-1-4244-9268-8/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
techniques have been obtained. In an adaptive multihop relay-
ing system, the source adapts its rate and/or power according
to the channel variation using a feedback of the effective SNR
from the destination to the source. Although the simultaneous
rate and power adaption achieves the highest capacity, it
has high implementation complexity. The constant-power rate
adaptive technique achieves a slightly inferior capacity that
approaches the capacity of the optimal rate and power adaptive
technique with increasing SNR [5]. On the other hand, it
has less complexity than the optimal rate and power adaptive
technique since the source only adapts its rate. Rate adaption
at the source is usually done by changing the constellation
size or modulation type based on the received SNR [6], or
by changing the coding rate of the channel code in the IEEE
802.11 Wireless LAN [7].
In this paper, we investigate the performance of AF mul-
tihop relaying systems employing constant power M -QAM
rate adaptive transmission when the average bit error rate
is constrained below a target threshold. We consider here
M-QAM rate adaptive schemes that achieve rate adaptation
by changing the constellation size. It is shown that the
performance of this system (in terms of spectral efficiency,
probability of outage, and error rate) can be evaluated using
the characteristic function of the inverse of the instantaneous
received SNR. In most papers evaluating the performance of
AF multihop systems [1]-[5], the instantaneous received SNR
1
is upper bounded by K of the harmonic mean of the individual
per-hop instantaneous received SNRs where K denotes the
number of hops, as a required intermediate result. It is shown
that this upper bound on the instantaneous received SNR
results in bounds on the performance which are not tight for
small to moderate values of SNR, and for Nakagami-m fading
with increasing m. In addition, depending on the channel
parameters and average link SNRs, increasing the number of
hops may decrease the tightness of these bounds. In this paper,
a new approximation for the instantaneous received SNR is
introduced. The proposed approximate instantaneous received
SNR expression is a scaled version of the harmonic mean of
the individual per-hop instantaneous SNRs. Thus, performance
of the AF multihop relaying systems with adaptive M -QAM
can be evaluated based on the proposed approximation with the
same computational complexity as the existing performance
bounds reported in the literature [1]-[5]. Numerical results
show that the approximate performance results are more accu-
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE Globecom 2011 proceedings.

rate than the performance bounds obtained using the harmonic-
mean-based upper bound and are very close to the exact results
for small values of SNR and larger values of the Nakagami
link fading parameters.
II. S YSTEM MODEL
Consider a K-hop AF system where the source, T0 ,
communicates with the destination, TK , via K − 1 relays,
T1 , . . . , TK−1 . It is assumed that all transmissions are over
orthogonal time slots to ensure half-duplex operation at the
relays. The source transmits its signal to the first relay in the
first time slot. Each relay amplifies its received signal and
then forwards it to the next terminal in the next time slot. The
amplification gain at the k th relay is chosen as [8]
Pk
A2k = 2 (1)
Pk−1 |αk | + N0k
where Pk , k = 0, 1, . . . , K − 1, is the transmitter power from
the k th terminal, αk , k = 1, . . . , K is the fading gain of
the channel between terminals Tk−1 and Tk , and N0k is the
noise power at the k th terminal, k = 1, . . . , K. The relay
amplification factor in (1) satisfies the power constraints at
the relays and maximizes the instantaneous received SNR in
AF multi-hop relaying systems [9].
The instantaneous received SNR at the destination is given
by [2, eq. (2)]
K   −1
 1
γt = 1+ −1 (2)
γk
k=1
where γk denotes the instantaneous received SNR over the k th
hop defined as PNk−1
0
|αk |2 . In Nakagami-m fading, γk has a
k
Γk
Gamma distribution with parameters mk and m k
where mk
Pk−1
and Γk = N0 Ωk are the Nakagami parameter and the aver-
k   K
age SNR over the k th hop, respectively, and Ωk = E |αk |2
denotes the fading power over the k th hop.
The destination only needs to calculate its total instanta-
neous received SNR, select the appropriate transmission rate,
and feed it back to the source. This makes implementation of
size. For the case where the instantaneous received SNR falls
into the nth region, the constellation size 2n is used. The
region boundaries depend on the target bit error rate Pb0 .
For example, the region boundaries, ηn , can be set to the
instantaneous SNR that achieves the target bit error rate using
Mn -QAM, which are given by [10, eq. (30)]
 2
η1 = erfc−1 (2Pb0 )
2
ηn = μ(Mn − 1), n = 0, 2, 3, . . . , N
3
ηN +1 = +∞ (4)
where erfc−1 (·) denotes the inverse complementary error
function [13].
III. P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS
Performance in fading of a wireless communication system
is generally evaluated using the probability density function
(PDF), MGF or CHF of the instantaneous received SNR [14,
Ch. 9]. However, such statistics for the instantaneous received
SNR in an AF multihop system given in (2) are unknown.
On the other hand, performance of an AF multihop system
has been commonly evaluated using the MGF or CHF of the
reciprocal of the instantaneous received SNR [4], [5]. It is also
shown in Sections III. B and III. C that the performance of
adaptive continuous and discrete rate adaptive M -QAM can be
evaluated using the CHF of X = γ1t . However, a closed-form
expression for the MGF or CHF of X is not known because
the mathematical expression for γt given in (2) does not lend
itself to solution. Therefore, exact performance evaluation is
neither mathematically nor numerically tractable.
The performance of AF multihop systems has been mainly
studied using the upper bound on the instantaneous received
SNR given in [2, eq. (4)], namely
−1
1
UB
γt < γt = . (5)
γk
k=1
The MGF of X LB
= 1
is given by
γtU B

the adaptive M -QAM feasible. In adaptive continuous rate K

   m2k


 2 mk s mk s
(ACR) M -QAM, the number of bits per symbol is varied MX LB (s) = Km k 2
depending on the instantaneous received SNR, γt , to achieve Γ(mk ) Γk Γk
k=1
the spectral efficiency R given by [10, eq. (29)] (6)
  using [2, eq. (10)] in Nakagami-m fading where Γ(·) denotes
R 1 3γt the gamma function [16, eq. (8.310.1)] and Kmk (·) is the the
= log2 (M ) ≈ log2 1 + (3)
B K 2μ modified Bessel function of the second type of order mk [16,
1 eq. (8.432.1)]. The CHF of X is also given by
where the factor K reflects the fact that the information is
transmitted over K orthogonal time slots, B is the channel ΨX LB (w) = MX LB (s) |s=−jw . (7)
bandwidth, and μ = − ln (5Pb0 ) where Pb0 is the target bit
error rate. While an ACR scheme can be implemented [11], This leads to an upper bound on the achievable average
[12], adaptive discrete rate (ADR) M -QAM with discrete con- spectral efficiency and a lower bound on the probability of
stellation sizes Mn = 2n for n a positive integer, is preferred outage. However, as shown in Section IV, these performance
in practice due to its practical complexity. In the ADR system, bounds are not tight in small SNR regions and for larger
the constellation size varies based on the instantaneous re- values of the Nakagami parameter. In the following, we
ceived SNR. The range of the effective SNR is divided into N introduce a new approximation for the instantaneous received
regions, and each region is assigned to a specific constellation SNR that provides excellent accuracy for all SNR regions.
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE Globecom 2011 proceedings.

The achievable spectral efficiencies of AF multihop relaying SNRs for (any) K − 1 hops are large, e.g. Γi → ∞ for
systems with the ACR and ADR QAM schemes are then i = 1, 2, . . . , j − 1, j + 1, . . . , K − 1, k, both the numerator
obtained in Sections III. B and III. C, respectively. and the denominator of ĉ in (10) tend to Γ1j , j = i, and hence
ĉ tends to 1. For the case where all individual K per-hop SNRs
A. Novel Approximation for the Instantaneous Received SNR
are large, the denominator of ĉ tends to k=1 Γ1k and thus
We use an idea first explained in [18]. A lower bound on the ĉ → 1. Therefore, when the average SNRs over at least K − 1
exact instantaneous received SNR given in (2) can be obtained hops are large, the value of ĉ tends to 1 and hence the new
by replacing γk in γtU B given in (5) with cγk . The scaling approximation approaches the bound γtU B .
factor, c, is a parameter which is determined such that
K −1 B. Adaptive Continuous Rate M -QAM
1 The average spectral efficiency of the ACR M -QAM is
c ≤ γt . (8)
γk obtained as2
k=1   
B ∞ 3γ
The inequality in (8) becomes an equality if the parameter c Rcr = log2 1 + fγt (γ) dγ
K 0 2μ
is chosen as
K  ∞  
1 B 3
c = γt . (9) = log2 1 + fX (γ) dx (13a)
γk K 0 2μx
k=1
where fγt (γ) and fX (x) denote the PDF of γt and X, respec-
However, this choice for the scaling factor c results in the
tively. The average spectral efficiency can then be evaluated
same expression for the instantaneous received SNR as given
as
in (2), and consequently exact performance evaluation remains  π2 
intractable. This is due to the fact that the scaling factor c is B ΨX (tan(θ)) 
Rcr = sec2 (θ) ln(1.5j tan(θ))
a random variable, depending on the instantaneous per-hop πK ln 2 0 j tan(θ)
SNRs. To overcome this difficulty, we propose substituting 
Γk for γk in (9), i.e. + exp(1.5j tan(θ))E1 (1.5j tan(θ)) + ν dθ
K 1 (13b)
ĉ =   k=1 Γk  . (10)
K
1 + 1
− 1 using [5, eq. (12)] where (·) denotes the real part of its
k=1 Γk
argument, ΨX (·) is the CHF of X, ν is the Euler’s constant
Thus, the instantaneous received SNR, γt , can be approxi- [16, p. xxxii] and E1 (·) denotes the exponential integral
mated as K −1 function [17, eq. (5.1.1)].
app
1 Since an exact expression in closed-form is not known
γt ≈ γt = ĉ . (11) for ΨX (w), an approximation for the evaluation of Rcr and
γk
k=1 an upper bound on Rcr can be obtained using (13b) with
Therefore, the performance (probability of outage, average ΨX (·) replaced by (12) and (7), respectively. The integral in
spectral efficiency, and error rate) of an AF multihop relaying (13b) can be then readily evaluated in Matlab with the same
system can be evaluated, in general, using the MGF or CHF of computational complexity for both the upper bound and the
X LB and using the proposed approximation for the received proposed approximation obtained, respectively, using (5) and
SNR given in (11). Note that this solution has the same com- (11)3 .
putational complexity as the performance bounds commonly
1 C. Adaptive Discrete Rate M -QAM
used in the literature. Now, the CHF of X app = γ app is given
t
by The achievable average spectral efficiency for the ADR M -
ΨX app (w) = MX LB (s) |s=−jĉw . (12) QAM is given by4 [10, eq. (33)]
N
Note that the approximate expression for the instantaneous B
Rdr = nφn (14a)
received SNR given in (11) is not necessarily a lower bound K n=1
or an upper bound on γt . However, since ĉ is less than 1
for all values of the average per-hop SNRs1 , γtapp is a lower where
 ηn+1
bound on γtU B . Thus, the outage and error probabilities of an
φn = fγt (γ)dγ (14b)
AF multihop system evaluated using γtU B is upper bounded ηn
by the outage and error probabilities obtained using γtapp .
2 Since the transmitter has the instantaneous channel information, the
The average spectral efficiency obtained using the proposed
compatibility constraint [15] required for the capacity evaluation under only
approximation will give a lower bound on the ergodic capacity receiver side information dos not need to be fulfilled.
obtained based on γtU B . In addition, note that when the average 3 For the special case of the dual-hop system, the integral in (13b) with
ΨX (·) replaced by either (7) or (12) can be obtained in closed-form using
1 Recall that the inequality given in (5) is valid for all nonzero values of [19, eq. (10c)].
γk , k = 1, . . . , K. Thus, the numerator is less than the denominator in the 4 Note that the factor 1 is due to the fact that the information is transmitted
K
quotient given in (10), and hence ĉ < 1. over K orthogonal time slots.
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE Globecom 2011 proceedings.

that can be evaluated as

 ∞  1  1.8

1 ηn
φn = ΨX (w) exp (−jwx) dx dw (14c)
2π −∞ 1.6 Shannon limit [5, eq. (12)]
1 ACR (exact)
ηn+1
    ACR (upper bound)

 ∞ exp −jw 1
− exp −jw 1
1.4 ACR (approximation)

1 ηn+1 ηn

Average spectral effiency (Bit/Sec/Hz)

ADR (exact)

= ΨX (w) dw 1.2
ADR (upper bound)

2π −∞ jw ADR (approximation)

(14d) 1
 π2 
1 ΨX (tan(θ))
sec2 (θ)
5 regions
= 0.8
π 0 j tan(θ)
      3 regions

tan(θ) tan(θ) 0.6

exp −j − exp −j dθ
ηn+1 ηn 0.4
(14e) 1 region

0.2
where we have used the change of variable x = γ1 and
1
∞
fX (x) = 2π −∞ X
Ψ (w) exp (−jwx) dw in (14c), and the 0
0 5 10 15 20
P/N (dB)
change of variable w = tan(θ) in (14e). Similar to (13b), 0

an approximation for Rdr and an upper bound on Rdr can be (a)

obtained using (14e) with ΨX (·) replaced by (12) and (7),
respectively. The integral in (14e) can be readily evaluated in
Matlab. 1.8
Note that since the transmission is halted when the received
SNR, γt , is below the threshold η1 , there is a probability of 1.6 Shannon limit [5, eq. (12)]
ACR (exact)
outage given by ACR (upper bound)

 η1 1.4 ACR (approximation)

ADR (exact)
Average spectral efficiency (Bit/Sec/Hz)

Pout = P r (γt < η1 ) = fγt (γ)dγ 1.2

ADR (upper bound)
ADR (approximation)
0 5 regions

(15a) 1
3 regions

that can be evaluated as [5, eq. (10c)] 0.8

 π2   
1 j tan(θ) 0.6
Pout = 1 −  1 − exp −
π 0 η0
 0.4 1 region
ΨX (tan(θ))
sec2 (θ)dθ. (15b)
j tan(θ) 0.2

In addition, while the ACR always meets the desired BER 0

0 5 10 15 20
target, the ADR M -QAM results in a smaller error probability P/N (dB)
0

than the target BER due to the discrete partitions of the (b)
received SNR. The average bit error rate of the ADR scheme
is obtained as [10, eq. (35)] Fig. 1. Achievable average spectral efficiency (per unit bandwidth) of
N different adaptive AF 3-hop systems for target bit error rate 10−3 and different
nPbn Nakagami link fading parameters. (a) m1 = m2 = m3 = 1 (Rayleigh
Pbdr = n=1
N
(16a) fading), (b) m1 = 2, m2 = 4, m3 = 8.
n=1 nφn
where Pbn is approximated as [10, eqs. (28) and (36)]
 ηn+1  
3γ bounds obtained based on γtU B . In the numerical examples,
Pbn ≈ Pbnapp = 0.2 exp − fγt (γ)dγ we consider multihop systems with terminals located in a
ηn 2(2n − 1)
(16b) straight line with equal distances from preceding and following
which can be evaluated using the Monte Carlo method. Note terminals. In all systems we assume that equal portions of
that Pbnapp gives an upper bound on the exact bit error rate for the total available power, P , are allocated to the source
n ≥ 2 and for target bit error rate less than 10−2 [10]. and relays (i.e. uniform power allocation policy). It is also
assumed that the noise powers at all terminals are equal to N0 .
IV. N UMERICAL R ESULTS Thus, according to the Friis propagation model [20], we have
In this section, the performance in Nakagami-m fading of Γk = K δ−1 NP0 , k = 1, . . . , K, where δ denotes the path loss
different AF multihop relaying systems with adaptive M - exponent. In the numerical examples, we assume that δ = 2
QAM schemes is evaluated using the new approximation and in all systems considered.
compared to the exact performance as well as the performance Figs. 1 and 2 show the achievable average spectral efficiency
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE Globecom 2011 proceedings.
0 −2
10
m =m =m =1
1 2 3 10
−1
10
m =m =m =2.5
1 2 3
Probability of outage
−2
10
Exact (simulation)
Lower bound (theory)
Approximation (theory)
−3
10
m =3
1
m2=3.5
m =4
3
−4
10
0 5 10 15
P/N (dB)
0 0
Fig. 2. Probability of outage of different adaptive AF 3-hop systems for
target bit error rate 10−3 and different Nakagami link fading parameters.
(per unit bandwidth) and the probability of outage of different
adaptive AF 3-hop systems for target bit error rate 10−3 and
different Nakagami link fading parameters. The approximate
results and the bounds were obtained using (13) and (14)
for the achievable spectral efficiencies of ACR and ADR
schemes, and using (15b) for the outage probability, with
ΨX (·) replaced by (12) and (7), respectively. It is seen in Figs.
1 and 2 that the proposed approximation predicts the exact
performance closely in all SNR regions. On the other hand,
the lower bound on the probability of outage obtained and the
upper bound on the average spectral efficiency are noticeably
looser in small SNR regimes (e.g. less than 5 dB) and for
larger values of the Nakagami parameter. It is also seen from
Figs. 1 and 2 that the proposed approximation approaches the
performance bounds for increasing SNR.
For comparison purposes, we have also included the Shan-
non capacity of the constant power rate adaptive system [5,
eq. (12)]. For example, the ACR QAM system considered
in Fig. 1(b) achieves the average spectral efficiency per unit
bandwidth 1 Bit/Sec/Hz within almost 5 dB of the Shannon
capacity. The ADR QAM with 5 regions loses an additional 2
dB at this rate. This is because the switching thresholds in the
ADR system are chosen such that the instantaneous bit error
probability is below the target bit error rate. In a bandwidth
constrained system, the ACR will be preferable to the ADR,
while in a power limited system, the ADR has advantage with
smaller bit error rate performance, and in turn fewer packet
retransmissions, etc. Fig. 3 shows the bit error rate of AF 3-
hop systems with ACR scheme and ADR scheme obtained
using (16) for the target bit error rate 10−3 and Nakagami
link parameters m1 = 2, m2 = 4, m3 = 8. It is clearly seen
that the ADR achieves much smaller bit errors rates than the
target bit error rate. This, in turn, results in smaller spectral
efficiency, as seen from Fig. 1. It is also seen that as the
10
−3
5 regions
−4
10 3 regions
Bit error rate
ACR
−5 ADR (exact)
m =2 10
1 ADR (upper bound)
m2=4
ADR (approximation)
m =8
3
−6
10
1 region
−7
10
20 10 15 20
P/N (dB)
Fig. 3. Bit error rate of AF 3-hop systems with ACR and ADR for target
bit error rate 10−3 and Nakagami link fading parameters m1 = 2, m2 = 4,
m3 = 8.
number of regions increases, the ADR offers an error rate
closer to the target bit error rate, and hence, achieves higher
spectral efficiency, as seen from Fig. 1. In addition, note that
the results obtained both based on the proposed approximation
(11) and the upper bound (5) are in close agreement with each
other as well as with the exact simulated results in the case
of adaptive schemes with 3 regions and 5 regions. This is
because the source in the ADR system starts transmitting when
the SNR is above the threshold η1 . Recall from Section III.
A, that for sufficiently large values of SNR, the approximate
instantaneous SNR expression, γtapp , approaches the upper
bound γtU B in (5).
Fig. 4 shows the achievable average spectral efficiency
versus the number of hops for different adaptive AF multihop
relaying systems for target bit error rate 10−3 and assuming
the Nakagami fading parameters are 2.5 for all links. The ADR
systems in Fig. 4(b) are assumed to partition the effective
SNR range into 5 regions. It is again seen that the proposed
approximation is more accurate than the performance bounds
for any number of hops and especially for smaller values
of SNR. For larger values of SNR, the accuracies of the
performance bounds and the approximation get slightly better
as the number of hops increases as seen from Fig. 4(b). Note
that, due to the orthogonal transmission considered in this
paper, increasing the number of hops decreases the achievable
spectral efficiencies, as seen in Figs. 4(a) and 4(b). However,
it is seen from Figs. 4(a) and 4(b) that the gap between the
spectral efficiencies achieved by the adaptive QAM and the
Shannon limit gets smaller as the number of hops increases.
V. CONCLUSION
The performance of an AF multihop relaying system with
adaptive M -QAM schemes was evaluated. As an intermediate
step for the performance analysis, a new approximation for
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE Globecom 2011 proceedings.

0.02
numbers of hops. The ADR scheme suffers an additional
0.018 penalty especially for smaller numbers of region boundaries,
Shannon limit [5, eq. (12)] but achieves smaller bit error rate. Comparing ACR to ADR,
0.016 ACR (exact)
ACR (upper bound) the results show that the ACR has average spectral efficiency,
Average spectral efficiency (Bit/Sec/Hz)

ACR (approximation)
0.014 while the ADR has better BER performance but loss in spectral
efficiency.
0.012

0.01 R EFERENCES
[1] M. O. Hasna, and M. S. Alouini, “End-to-end performance of transmis-
0.008
sion systems with relays over Rayleigh fading channels,” IEEE Trans.
Wireless Commun., vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 1126-1131, Nov. 2003.
0.006
[2] M. O. Hasna, and M. S. Alouini, “Outage probability of multihop
transmission over Nakagami fading channels,” IEEE Commun. Lett., vol.
0.004
7, no. 5, pp. 216-218, May 2003.
0.002
[3] G. K. Karagiannidis, T. Tsiftsis, and R. K. Malik, “Bounds for multihop
relayed communications in Nakagami-m fading,” IEEE Trans. Commun.,
0
vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 18-22, Jan. 2006.
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [4] G. Farhadi and N. C. Beaulieu, “A general framework for symbol
Number of hops
error probability analysis of wireless communication systems and its
(a) application in amplify-and-forward multihop relaying systems,” IEEE
Trans. Veh. Tech., vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 1505-1511, Mar. 2010.
[5] G. Farhadi and N. C. Beaulieu, “Capacity of amplify-and-forward
1.6 multihop relaying systems under adaptive transmission,” IEEE Trans.
Commun., vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 758-763, Mar. 2010.
[6] A. Goldsmith, Wireless Communications, New York: Cambridge Univer-
1.4 Shannon limit [5, eq. (12)] sity Press, 2005.
ACR (exact)
ACR (upper bound)
[7] M. S. Obaidat and D. G. Green, “SNR-WPA: an adaptive protocol for
1.2 ACR (approximation) mobile 802.11 wireless LANs,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Commun., Paris,
Average spectral efficeincy (Bit/Sec/Hz)

ADR (exact) France, vol. 7, pp. 3911 - 3915, Jun. 2004.

1 ADR (approximation)
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
2 3
Fig. 4. Achievable average spectral efficiency versus number of hops for
different adaptive AF multihop relaying systems for target bit error rate 10−3
and Nakagami fading parameter 2.5 for (a) NP = −10 dB, (b) NP = 10
0 0
dB and ADR scheme with 5 regions.
the instantaneous received SNR in an AF multihop relaying
system was introduced. Numerical results indicated that the
proposed approximation gives much more accurate estimations
of the probability of outage and the average spectral efficiency
than results obtained using the harmonic-mean-based upper
bound on the instantaneous received SNR. It was shown that
the ACR scheme achieves an average spectral efficiency within
a certain gap from the Shannon limit that narrows for large
ADR (upper bound) [8] J. N. Laneman, D. N. C. Tse, and G. W. Wornell, “Cooperative diversity in
wireless networks: efficient protocols and outage behavior,” IEEE Trans.
Inform. Theory, vol. 50, no. 12, pp. 3062-3080, Dec. 2004.
[9] G. Farhadi, “Performance evaluation, optimal power allocation, and phys-
ical layer designs for wireless relaying systems,” Ph.D. thesis, University
of Alberta, Canada, 2009.
[10] M. S. Alouini and A. J. Goldsmith, “Adaptive modulation over Nak-
agami fading channels,” Wireless Personal Commun., vol. 13, pp. 119-
143, 2000.
[11] G. D. Forney Jr., R. G. Gallager, G. R. Lang, F. M. Longstaff, and S.
U. Qureshi, “Efficient Modulation for Band-Limited Channels,” IEEE J.
Select. Areas Commun., Vol. SAC-2, pp. 632646, 1984.
[12] X. Dong, N. C. Beaulieu, and P. H. Wittke, “Signaling constellations
for fading channels,” IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 47, no. 5, pp. 703-714,
4 5 6 7 8 May 1999.
Number of hops
[13] L. Carlitz, “The Inverse of the Error Function,” Pacific J. Math. vol. 13,
(b) pp. 459-470, 1963.
[14] M. K. Simon, and M. S. Alouini, Digital Communications Over Fading
Channels, New York: Wiley-Interscience, 2000.
[15] A. J. Goldsmith and P. P. Varaiya, “Capacity of fading channels with
channel side information,” IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol. 43, no. 6,
Nov. 1997.
[16] I. S. Gradshteyn, and I. M. Ryzhik, Table of Integrals, Series, and
Products, 6 ed. New York: Academic, 2000.
[17] M. Abramowitz, and I. A. Stegun, Handbook of Mathematical Functions
with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables, 9 ed. New York: Dover,
1972.
[18] N. C. Beaulieu and Y. Chen, “An accurate approximation to the average
error probability of cooperative diversity in Nakagami-m fading,” IEEE
Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 9, no. 9, pp. 2707-2711, Sept. 2010.
[19] G. Farhadi and N. C. Beaulieu, “On the ergodic capacity of wireless
relaying systems over Rayleigh fading channels,” IEEE Trans. Wireless
Commun., vol. 7, no. 11, pp. 4462-4467, Nov. 2008.
[20] T. S. Rappaport, Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1996.