Performance Evaluation of Fading Channels In Non-Regenerative Communication Protocol

There is a high demand for higher data rates and improved link reliability in wireless communication networks with the growth of multimedia services. Even though Mulltiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems can achieve these demands, they face some limitations when they are deployed in single antenna systems such as mobile handsets. In this context cooperative communication has attracted considerable attention where relays cooperate to achieve MIMO gains. This work evaluates the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of Multi-hop non-regenerative communication protocol for cooperative communication system deploying Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) modulation over different fading channels for 3 hop and 2 hop cases. The simulated results show that the increase in number of relays in non-regenerative communication protocol have same effect when different fading channels are used and that the performance of the system improves due to the extended network coverage even though there is an increase in BER. Also analysed the performance of system in Compress-and-Forward (CF) relaying protocol for cooperative communication system. Simulation is done using MATLAB which is an ideal tool for simulating digital communication system.