Amplify-and-Forward Relay Selection with Outdated Channel State Information

We study the effect of outdated channel estimation on the outage performance of amplify-and-forward (AF) relay selection, where only one out of the set of available relays is activated. In particular, we derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability of two variations of AF relay selection, namely best relay selection and partial relay selection, when the selection is based upon outdated channel estimates. Numerical results manifest that the outage performance of both schemes under consideration is highly dependent on the level of imperfection of the channel estimates. It is further shown that it may be preferable, in terms of outage probability, not to include links in the relay selection process that experience high maximum Doppler shifts.