Accurate performance analysis of opportunistic decode-and-forward relaying

In this paper, we investigate an opportunistic relaying scheme where the selected relay assists the source-destination (direct) communication. In our study, we consider a regenerative opportunistic relaying scheme in which the direct path may be considered unusable, and the destination may use a selection combining technique. We first derive the exact statistics of each hop, in terms of probability density function (PDF). Then, the PDFs are used to determine accurate closed form expressions for end-to-end outage probability for a transmission rate R. Furthermore, we evaluate the asymptotical performance analysis and the diversity order is deduced. Finally, we validate our analysis by showing that performance simulation results coincide with our analytical results over different network architectures. © 2011 IEEE.