Performance analysis of cognitive multihop relaying with m-QAM detect-and-forward in Nakagami-m fading channels

In this work, we investigate the performance of cognitive multihop regenerative relaying systems in the "underlay" spectrum sharing scenario. The multiple relays perform "detect-and-forward" relaying strategy to convey a message with an order m quadrature amplitude modulation (m-QAM) from the source to the destination over independent but not necessarily identical Nakagami-m fading channels. We adopt a closed-form analysis framework based on univariate and bivariate Meijer G-functions to derive the end-to-end error performance (in terms of bit and symbol error rates), the outage probability, and the ergodic capacity. Various numerical examples are presented to illustrate the results with a large combination of system and fading parameters, and simulation results confirm the accuracy of our closed-form analysis.