Performance analysis of cooperative diversity using equal gain combining (EGC) technique over Rayleigh fading channels

Cooperative diversiy is a promising technology for future wireless networks. In this paper, based on the moment generating function (MGF), we derive exact closed-form expressions for the average bit error rate (BER), the amount of fading (AF), and outage probability (P-out) for cooperative diversity networks with amplify-and-forward relaying over Rayleigh-fading channel using differentially-non-coherent equal gain combining (EGC) technique. We show that this scheme (differentially-non-coherent EGC) achieves a diversity order of 2 at high SNR. The main advantage of this scheme is that it does not need channel state information of the transmission links at the relay and destination nodes. This feature reduces the design and implementation complexity. Furthermore, we study in this paper the impact of the relay location on the system performance.