Performance Analysis of OSTBC for Fixed Gain Relay Network over Nakagami-m Fading with Correlated Antennas

We analyze the performance of a dual-hop relay system with correlated antennas at the source and the destination. Orthogonal space time block coding (OSTBC) is employed at the source. Single-antenna relays with and without direct transmission between the source and the destination are stud- ied. Assuming non-identically distributed Nakagami-m fading channels, closed- form expressions of outage probability, average symbol error rate (SER), and moment generating function (MGF) of the instantaneous end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are derived for the single- relay case. Asymptotic analysis is also performed to obtain the diversity order for the single-relay system. Furthermore, the analysis is extended to obtain expressions for the outage probability and SER for multiple-relay systems. Analytical results are validated with Monte-Carlo simulations using Mathematica and MATLAB programs.