Performance analysis of dual-hop variable-gain relaying with beamforming over κ-μ fading channels

In this study, the performance of a dual-hop amplify-and-forward relaying system with beamforming is analysed, where only the source and destination are equipped with multiple antennas and both hops are subject to κ-μ fading channels. The κ-μ fading model is a general fading model that can accurately model practical small scale fading in line-of-sight environments and accommodates Rician, Nakagami-m, and Rayleigh as special cases. New exact analytical expressions on the outage probability (OP), average symbol error rate (SER), and average capacity are derived. Moreover, asymptotic results for the OP, SER, and average capacity are also derived in simpler forms in terms of basic elementary functions which make it easy to understand the system behaviour and the impact of the channel parameters. These analytical results are general and can emulate different symmetric and asymmetric fading scenarios as special cases such as Rician/Rician, Nakagami-m/Nakagami-m, Rayleigh/Rayleigh, and mixed κ-μ, Rician, Nakagami-m, and Rayleigh fading links.