Vijayan T
BER is presented for the end to end performance of dual-hop wireless communication systems employing transmit diversity with orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs), where a non regenerative or regenerative relay is equipped with a single antenna operating over flat Rayleigh fading channels. The end-to-end performance of dual-hop transmission certainly depends on the nature and complexity of relays. In nonregenerative systems, relays just amplify and forward the incoming signal without any other sort of manipulation on the signal. On the other hand, regenerative systems use more complicated relays that decode the signal received through the first hop and retransmit it, after encoding appropriately, into the second hop. More specifically, we provide probability density functions (PDF) and moment generating functions (MGF) for the end-to-end SNR of the dual-hop OSTBC transmissions and then present its BER performance over M-ary QAM and PSK modulations, respectively. Numerical investigation shows that the analytic BER provided in the paper makes an exact match with the simulation result in various multiple-antenna transmission scenarios. The result also shows how the number of antennas equipped at the source and destination affects the end-to-end performance