Outage analysis of opportunistic cooperation over rayleigh fading channels

Cooperation is emerging as a promising technology to combat the wireless fading and enhance the channel capacity. However,cooperative transmission can not be guaranteed to perform better always than direct transmission, since the statistics of both direct and relay channels are varied due to large scale fading. Therefore, we design an opportunistic criterion to automatically determine which transmission mode should be adopted depending on the channel quality from the source to the cooperative relay, as opposed to the deterministic cooperation regardless of relay channel conditions. According to the proposed criterion, we further present two opportunistic cooperation schemes, namely, the SDC (selection diversity combining) -based and the MRC (maximum ratio combining) -based opportunistic cooperation, and develop the closed-form expressions of outage probability for the proposed schemes over Rayleigh fading channels. For the purpose of comparison, we also analyze the outage probability for the known deterministic cooperation and coded cooperation. Numerical results show that our schemes outperform the traditional schemes in terms of outage probability, especially when the relay channel conditions worsen. In addition, we compare the MRC-based opportunistic cooperation with the SDC-based opportunistic cooperation, showing the superiority of the former scheme.