“…Although fixed gain relaying is cost effective and easy to deploy, variablegain relaying provides additional performance gain as compared to fixed-gain 35 relaying, and hence, is considered in this work [14,15].Additionally, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is also one of the promising multicarrier modulation schemes which provides spectrally efficient high data rate communication with improved robustness even in severely degraded channel conditions [16,17]. Different wireless communication stan-40 dards such as IEEE 802.11a/g/n/ac, IEEE 802.16j/m, IEEE 802.22 [18,19], 3GPP LTE-Advanced, and digital video broadcasting [20,21] have adopted OFDM as their main modulation technique, and is also a possible modulation scheme for 5G standard [22].Thus, cooperative communication in conjunction with OFDM provides im-45 proved spectral efficiency, greater coverage and capacity enhanced link reliability and robustness at high data-rate, which provides a solid platform for future wireless communication systems [23]. For further data-rate improvement, higher order modulation schemes such as family of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) (i.e.…”