Energy Efficient and Performance Analysis of Multihop Wireless Communication Over Nakagami-m Fading Channel

Abstract

The concept of multihop communications (where the source communicates with the destination via many intermediate nodes) has been revisited and adapted to mitigate wireless channel impairments and ensure broader coverage. It has been shown in the literature that, in addition to extending coverage, overcoming shadowing and reducing the transmit power, multihop communications can increase the capacity of the network at a low additional cost.

On the other hand, the problem of energy efficiency is one of the current biggest challenges towards green radio communications. Morevover, electromagnetic radiation is at its limit in many contexts, while for battery-powered devices, transmit and circuit energy consumption has to be minimized for better battery lifetime and performance.

In this work, the performance of multihop communication over Nakagami-m fading is investigated for both cases without and with diversity combining. Closed form expressions of the average ergodic capacity are derived for each of these cases. Then, an expression of the outage probability is obtained using the inverse of Laplace transform and the average bit error rate is bounded using the Moment-Generating-Function approach. The energy efficiency is analyzed using the "consumption factor" as a metric, and it is derived in closed-form. And based on the obtained expressions, we propose a power allocation strategy maximizing this consumption factor.