On optimum selection relaying protocols in cooperative wireless networks

In this letter, the outage probabilities of selection relaying protocols are analyzed and compared for cooperative wireless networks. It is assumed that both source and relay use equal allocated time in transmission. Depending on the quality of the source-relay channel, the relay may choose either Decode-and-Forward (DF), Amplify-and-Forward (AF), or Direct-Transmission (DT) to forward signals. It turns out that in terms of outage probability, two selection relaying schemes are better than others: selecting between DF and AF protocols (DF-AF) or selecting between DF and DT protocols (DF-DT). It is shown that with an equal power allocation, both of the DF-AF and DF-DT selection relaying protocols have the same asymptotic outage probability. However, with an optimum power allocation strategy, the DF-AF selection scheme is in general better than the DF-DT selection scheme. Note that the optimum power allocations depend on channel variances, not on instantaneous channel gains. When the quality of the relay-destination link is much better than that of the source-relay link, observed from simulation, the outage probability of the DF-AF selection protocol with its optimum power allocation is 1.5dB better than that of the DF-DT selection with its own optimum power allocation. Extensive simulations are presented to validate the analytical results.