Cooperative diversity performance of selection relaying over correlated shadowing

The study of relaying systems has found renewed interest in the context of cooperative diversity for communication channels suffering from fading. In particular, dual-hop relaying with diversity combining of the relayed and direct path at the receiver has practical importance and can be considered as a building block for forming larger communication systems. This paper presents novel analytical expressions and numerical results on cooperative diversity performance using selection relaying over correlated lognormal channels for both SC and MRC techniques at the receiver. In addition, an exact framework for comparing the performance and efficiency of the medium access protocol and relay capabilities (TDMA/half-duplex, SDMA/full-duplex) is proposed. Finally, based on the analysis and novel mathematical expressions for the outage probability, we investigate the impact of the lognormal parameters (including correlation) on the cooperative system performance and its efficiency.