Performance of wireless multihop communications systems with cooperative diversity over fading channels

We present closed‐form bounds for the performance of wireless multihop communications systems with cooperative diversity over Nakagami‐m fading channels. The end‐to‐end signal‐to‐noise ratio is formulated and upper bounded by using the inequality between harmonic and geometric means of positive random variables. Closed‐form expression is derived for the moment‐generating function and is used to obtain lower bounds for the average error probability. Numerical results are compared with computer simulations showing the tightness of the proposed bounds. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.