On the Error Performance of Relay-Assisted Vehicular Communication Systems

Abstract

The paper investigates a dual-hop relay-assisted vehicle-to-vehicle communication system where the fading effects in wireless channels are assumed to have double Rayleigh fading distribution, which is worse than Rayleigh fading. In the considered system, source and destination nodes are equipped with single antenna while the relay has multiple antennas with employing maximum ratio combining method to obtain the maximum signal-to-noise-ratio at the relay. In the analysis of the system, bit error probability is obtained for decode-and-forward and amplify-and-forward relaying protocols. The analytical results are validated by Monte Carlo simulations providing the performance comparison for both relaying protocols.