A novel and unified approach for averaged channel capacity and averaged effective capacity analyses of diversity combining and multihop transmission schemes in flat fading environments

In this paper, we introduce an Lp-norm aggregation to present a signal-to-noise ratio expression unified not only for such diversity combining schemes as equal-gain combining, maximal-ratio combining, and selection combining, but also for such transmission techniques as multihop transmission. Accordingly, we propose two moment-generating function-based approaches that both respectively unify the exact analyses of the averaged channel capacity and averaged effective capacity over generalized fading channels with respect to the diversity combining and multihop transmission schemes. Finally, the mathematical formalism is illustrated by numerical special cases and verified by simulations.