Node Switching Rates of Opportunistic Relaying in Rician and Nakagami-m Fading

In opportunistic relaying systems, only the best relay among K available relays is selected to participate in cooperation. This setup efficiently achieves diversity gain. However, the switching rate of such systems are of great importance due to practical implementation issues, for example, the corruption of the data signal by the switching transient, channel estimation failure due to excessive switches as well as switching overheads which increase with increased switching. The switching rates of opportunistic relaying systems with two or more relays operating under Rician and Nakagami-m fading are obtained in closed-form or single integral expressions. The closed-form solutions have an explicit dependence on the Doppler frequency of the fading.