Performance investigation of multi-relay cooperative diversity networks

In this paper, we consider a cooperative network consisting of an origin node, multiple intermediate nodes and a final node. The performance of conventional selection combining (SC) suffers degradation for the described network model. In this paper, we propose a new form of SC for multiple intermediate nodes with the use of full channel state information. An end-to-end symbol error probability is derived for the proposed SC scheme with M-ary phase shift keying modulation technique in the presence of flat Rayleigh fading channel. We use decode and forward protocol at the intermediate nodes. The origin to final node link and the intermediate to final node links are assumed to be independent and identically distributed. The results show that the proposed SC scheme performs better than the conventional SC scheme. The analytical results are validated through Monte-Carlo simulations.