Outage analysis of opportunistic multi-antenna relay selection in decode-and-forward relay networks

This article studies the closed-form expressions of outage performance for opportunistic relay under aggregate power constraint in decode-and-forward (DF) relay networks over Rayleigh fading channels, assuming that multiple antennas are available at the relay node. According to whether instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or average SNR can be utilized for relay selection, two opportunistic relay schemes, opportunistic multi-antenna relay selection (OMRS) and average best relay selection (ABRS) are proposed. The performances of both two schemes are evaluated by means of theoretical analysis and simulation. It is observed that OMRS is outage-optimal among multi-antenna relay selection schemes and closely approaches the beamforming (BF) scheme known as theoretical outage-optimal. Compared with previous single-antenna opportunistic relaying (OR) scheme, OMRS brings remarkable performance improvement, which is obtained from maximum ratio combining (MRC) and beamforming techniques. It is also shown that the performance of ABRS in asymmetric channels is close to OMRS in the low and median SNR range.