Strict suboptimality of selection amplify-and-forward relaying under global channel information

Selection amplify-and-forward (SAF) relaying, which has been shown to be optimal under the constraints of localized channel information at the relays and a constant relay power allocation (PA) template, is shown to be globally strictly suboptimal. A necessary condition for the outage optimality of the SAF PA, and an exponentially vanishing upper bound on the probability of the SAF optimality are derived.