End-to-end BER analysis for dual-hop OSTBC transmissions over Rayleigh fading channels

In this letter, a BER study is presented for the end-to-end performance of dual-hop wireless communication systems employing transmit diversity with orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs), where a nonregenerative or regenerative relay is equipped with a single antenna operating over flat Rayleigh fading channels. More specifically, we provide probability density functions (PDFs) and moment generating functions (MGFs) for the end-to-end SNR of the dual-hop OSTBC transmissions and then present its BER performance over M-ary QAM and PSK modulations, respectively. Numerical investigation shows that the analytic BER provided in the letter makes an exact match with the simulation result in various multiple-antenna transmission scenarios. The result also shows how the number of antennas equipped at the source and destination affects the end-to-end performance.