Threshold-Based Frame Error Rate Analysis of Incremental Hybrid Relay Selection Scheme

The incremental hybrid relay selection (IHS) scheme has recently attracted great attention for its high spectrum efficiency and robust performance. In this paper, we study the analytical frame error rate (FER) performance of the IHS scheme with and without applying channel coding at the source node. Specifically, we consider a multiple-relay cooperative network with a direct source-destination link, under dissimilar network settings, i.e., the channels of different relay branches experience Rayleigh block fading with different variances. We first develop an improved SNR threshold-based FER model for the general MIMO system. Using this model, we then derive the closed-form FER expression, and further make simplification at high SNRs. Monte- Carlo simulations are performed to validate the analytical results.