Performance analysis of decode-and-forward cooperative communication with the kth best partial relay selection

In this paper, we analyze the performance of the decode-and-forward cooperative communication with the k^th best partial relay selection. In the proposed protocol, the k^th best relay is chosen to help the source to transmit a signal to the destination using the source-relay channel state information (CSI). We derive the closed-form expressions of outage probability and symbol error rate (SER) for the proposed protocol as well as the direct transmission protocol (DT). The simulation results are presented to verify the validation of the analyses.