On the computation of the higher order statistics of the channel capacity for amplify-and-forward multihop transmission

Higher order statistics (HOS) of the channel capacity provide useful information regarding the level of reliability of signal transmission at a particular rate. In this paper, we propose a novel and unified analysis, which is based on the moment-generating function (MGF) approach, to efficiently and accurately compute the HOS of the channel capacity for amplify-and-forward (AF) multihop transmission over generalized fading channels. More precisely, our easy-to-use and tractable mathematical formalism requires only the reciprocal MGFs of the transmission hop signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Numerical and simulation results, which are performed to exemplify the usefulness of the proposed MGF-based analysis, are shown to be in perfect agreement.