Relay Selection for Decode-and-Forward Cooperative Network with Multiple Antennas

In this paper, a new relay selection scheme for decode-and-forward (DF) relay cooperative network with multiple antennas is proposed based on both channel state information (CSI) and transmission scheme by deriving the upper bound on the pairwise error probability (PEP) of the near-maximum-likelihood (near-ML) decoder. It is also proved that the proposed relay selection which selects m (1≤ m≤ N) relays from N relays achieves full diversity M_S M_D+N M_R min[M_S, M_D] regardless of the value of m in the DF relay network consisting of one source, one destination, and N relays with M_S, M_D, and M_R antennas, respectively. Through Monte Carlo simulation, the error correction performance of the proposed relay selection for various m is shown for the uncoded single-antenna, Alamouti coded, and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) DF relay networks.