Outage performance analysis of opportunistic decode-and-forward cooperative systems with spatially random relays

In this paper, the performance of opportunistic relaying in a dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relay network where the intermediate relay nodes are distributed according to a homogeneous Poisson point process with fixed density is analyzed. A sectorized relay selection region is considered, where the "best relay" is selected among those potential relay nodes that lie in this region. In particular, the density of the potential relay nodes and the closed-form expression for outage probability of the system with maximal ratio combining (MRC) receiver at the destination, is derived based on the theory of point processes. Our results show that, as expected, MRC receiver outperforms the selection combining (SC) receiver at spatially random networks. The results of this paper are attested through Monte-Carlo simulations.