Relay selection based on MAP estimation for cooperative communication with outdated channel state information

In this paper, we consider an amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative communication system when the channel state information (CSI) used in relay selection differs from that during data transmission, i.e., the CSI used in relay selection is outdated. The selected relay may not be actually the best for data transmission and the outage performance of the cooperative system will deteriorate. To improve its performance, we propose a relay selection strategy based on maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation, where relay is selected based on predicted signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To reduce the computation complexity, we approximate the a posteriori probability density of SNR and obtain a closed-form predicted SNR, and a relay selection strategy based on the approximate MAP estimation (RS-AMAP) is proposed. The simulation results show that this approximation leads to trivial performance loss from the perspective of outage probability. Compared with relay selection strategies given in the literature, the outage probability is reduced largely through RS-AMAP for medium-to-large transmitting powers and medium-to-high channel correlation coefficients.