On the Effective Capacity of Amplify-and-Forward Multihop Transmission Over Arbitrary and Correlated Fading Channels

This letter presents a novel approach for analyzing, in a unified way, the effective capacity performance of multihop transmission with channel state information assisted amplify-and-forward relay systems over arbitrary and correlated fading channels under a maximum delay constraint. Using a moment generating function based approach, an exact single integral expression for the effective capacity is deduced. This expression can be easily evaluated by means of standard numerical integration techniques for a great deal of fading distributions, such as the Nakagami-m, Generalized-K, and Generealized Gamma. Several case studies, including uncorrelated and correlated fading environments, are employed to demonstrate the versatility of the proposed analytical approach. Extensive numerically evaluated results accompanied with complimentary Monte-Carlo simulations are used to substantiate the analytical derivations.