# Performance Analysis of Two-Hop mmWave Relay Nodes over the 5G NR Uplink Signal
## 4 Simulation Results and Discussion
### Average Throughput  
In this subsection, we examine the achievable capacity performance of the proposed uplink mmWave NR-RNs protocols with single and multiple antennas for the 64-QAM and 256-QAM modulation schemes. It should be highlighted that the number of mmWave RF chains employed in the mmWave co-operative system is the same as the number of antennas, as has been considered in the discussed results in the previous subsection. Figure 12: BER comparison for different uplink mmWave NR-RN co-operative schemes implemented with the 256-QAM signal. The illustrated performance in Figures 13 and 14 describe the output throughput of the new radio UL-SCH transport channel processing. Therefore, Figures 13 and 14 plot the achievable throughput comparison for different proposed uplink mmWave NR-RN cooperative protocols, respectively, with 64-QAM and 256-QAM modulation schemes. Figure 13 shows that the achievable capacity performance recorded for the uplink mmWave MIMO NR-RNs reached a higher average throughput than the SISO technique and it can be observed that, by increasing the antenna number the network, greatly improves the throughput system. It can be seen from the figure that the uplink mmWave SISO D&F PCE algorithm achieved approximately the same average throughput as the uplink mmWave (2 \(\times\) 2 \(\times\) 2) A&F protocol. Nevertheless, when the SISO D&F LS algorithm is considered, the average performance of the system is low in comparison with the SISO D&F PCE algorithm, for example, the reached maximum throughput was 13.23 Mbps, which was achieved by the uplink mmWave (2 \(\times\) 2 \(\times\) 2) A&F and uplink mmWave SISO D&F PCE algorithms, respectively, from 11.4 and 12 dB of the SNR. In Figure 13, it is indicated that the throughput at SNR = 20 dB for (2 \(\times\) 2 \(\times\) 2) D&F LS protocol was approximately 23.03 Mbps; however, with channel knowledge, a capacity of 28.05 Mbps could be reached with the same SNR value, which represents a performance gain of about 5 Mbps. On the other hand, when it is compared with an uplink mmWave (2 \(\times\) 4 \(\times\) 4) A&F relay node, it was overcome by approximately 8 Mbps. Finally, it should be noted that the maximum throughput of our uplink 5G NR for the 64-QAM modulation scheme is 42 Mbps; in Figure 13, it can be seen that this was reached by the uplink mmWave (2 \(\times\) 4 \(\times\) 4) D&F PCE protocol from SNR = 16 dB. Additionally, when the (2 \(\times\) 4 \(\times\) 4) D&F LS algorithm was employed, the achieved maximum performance was 41.50 Mbps at SNR = 20 dB, which represents a 0.5 Mbps lower than the reached by the (2 \(\times\) 4 \(\times\) 4) D&F PCE protocol. Figure 13: Throughput comparison for different uplink mmWave NR-RN cooperative schemes implemented with the 64-QAM signal. Here, the simulation results of the proposed uplink mmWave NR-RN co-operative network are given for 256-QAM constellation scheme over the mmWave SISO and MIMO channels. It can be seen in Figure 14 that the uplink mmWave SISO A&F protocol reached a capacity of 13.33 Mbps at around SNR = 20 dB, while with the (2 \(\times\) 2 \(\times\) 2) antenna scheme, the co-operative network reached the same average throughput at around SNR = 10.2 dB; therefore, a performance gain may be achieved. Moreover, when we further increased the antenna number to the (2 \(\times\) 4 \(\times\) 4) configuration, the uplink mmWave co-operative network reached 39.97 Mbps at around SNR = 20 dB, implying that a 16.2 dB performance gain was successfully achieved compared to the throughput of the SISO A&F protocol. The achievable performances of uplink mmWave D&F strategies are also depicted in Figure 14. It was observed that the average capacity performance may be improved by the uplink mmWave D&F strategies, which was attained due to the impact of decoding and encoding stages the uplink mmWave received signal was subjected to before being transmitted to the gNodeB by means of the uplink mmWave D&F protocols.