On the Performance of Multihop-Intervehicular Communications Systems over n*Rayleigh Fading Channels

We investigate the performance of multihop-intervehicular communication systems with regenerative and nonregenerative relaying. We consider the so-called "n*Rayleigh distribution" as an adequate multipath fading channel model for vehicle-to-vehicle communication scenarios. We derive a novel approximation for the outage probability of maximum ratio combining (MRC) diversity reception. In addition, we analyze the amount of fading and optimize the power allocation for the investigated scenario. Numerical results show that regenerative systems are more efficient than nonregenerative systems when the cascading order (n) is small; however, for large n, our results demonstrate that the performance of both relaying techniques is rather similar.