Performance Analysis of Beamforming in Fixed-gain AF Relay Networks with Asymmetric Correlated Fading Channels

In this paper, the performance of beamforming (BF) for a dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network, where the source and destination are each equipped with multiple antennas, is investigated. It is assumed that the source-relay and relay-destination channels experience mixed fading distributions, namely, correlated Nakagami-m/Rician and correlated Rician/Nakagami-m, respectively. By considering fixed-gain relaying, analytical expressions for outage probability (OP) and average symbol error rate (ASER) are derived in closed-form. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of our performance analysis, also illustrate the impact of channel correlation, fading severity, Rician factor and antenna configuration on the performance of the system. It is shown that the correlated Nakagami-m/Rician fading channel can achieve better performance than the correlated Rician/Nakagami-m fading channel with the increase of fading severity parameter, and the correlated Rician/Nakagami-m fading channel may outperform the correlated Nakagami-m/Rician fading channel by enlarging the Rician factor.