  Energy detection is a favorable mechanism in several applications relating to
the identification of deterministic unknown signals such as in radar systems
and cognitive radio communications. The present work quantifies the detrimental
effects of cascaded multipath fading on energy detection and investigates the
corresponding performance capability. A novel analytic solution is firstly
derived for a generic integral that involves a product of the Meijer
$G-$function, the Marcum $Q-$function and arbitrary power terms. This solution
is subsequently employed in the derivation of an exact closed-form expression
for the average probability of detection of unknown signals over $N$*Rayleigh
channels. The offered results are also extended to the case of square-law
selection, which is a relatively simple and effective diversity method. It is
shown that the detection performance is considerably degraded by the number of
cascaded channels and that these effects can be effectively mitigated by a
non-substantial increase of diversity branches.
