Performance of decode-and-forward opportunistic cooperation with channel estimation errors

In this paper, we investigate the outage performance of decode-and-forward (DF) based opportunistic cooperative communications with channel estimation errors at the receivers under Rayleigh fading channels, in which the effect of the direct link has been explicitly evaluated. To be specific, the exact expression of outage probability has been derived for arbitrary values of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) when pilot power is fixed. Through asymptotic analysis, the closed-form expressions of outage probability in the high SNR region and the diversity order are obtained. The analysis shows that the channel estimation errors due to limited pilot power impose a significant impact on the outage performance, leading to the diversity order be 0 even when the direct link is available. Although deploying more relays can mitigate the estimation errors effectively, the performance limit caused by the estimation errors becomes more obvious as SNR grows. For specific pilot power configuration and relay deployment, the outage probability remains unchanged even if data power approaches to infinity. Furthermore, simulation results are presented to verify our analysis.