Outage performance of Decode-and-Forward partial selection in Nakagami-m fading channels

In this paper, we investigate the outage performance of Decode-and-Forward with partial selection relaying in dualhop cooperative Nakagami-m fading links. The source, based on the unique knowledge of local first hop channel state information, selects the best relay to increase the chances of successful decoding and hence the possibility of cooperation when the direct link is also available. After deriving the exact distribution of the sum of two gamma variates with the same shape parameter, the outage probability of the system-with and without the direct link-is obtained in closed-form. We also derive the ε-outage capacity in different particular cases, and the obtained results- when the channel model is reduced to a Rayleigh fading-are either new or correspond to those previously obtained in other works. Simulation results confirm the accuracy of our analysis for a large selection of system and fading parameters. © 2009 IEEE.