Outage Performance of Decode-and-Forward Relay Systems Using Imperfect MRC Receiver over Nakagami-m Fading Channels

Abstract

In this letter, we analyze the outage performance of decode-and-forward relay systems with imperfect MRC receiver at the destination. Unlike the conventional perfect MRC, the weight of each branch of the imperfect MRC receiver is only the conjugate of the channel impulse response, not being normalized by the noise variance. We derive an exact closed-form expression for the outage probability over dissimilar Nakagami-m fading channels. Various numerical examples confirm the proposed analysis.