Cooperative regions for decode and forward strategies over Rayleigh fading channels

Cooperative diversity has the ability of achieving multiplexing and diversity gains by taking advantage of the features and potentials of spatial distribution. Based on the asymptotic outage probability, we define the Cooperative Gain (CG) to evaluate the benefits of cooperation over direct transmission under high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). With the presence of Rayleigh fading and path loss, our analytical results illustrate the appropriate Cooperative Region (CR), in which the source prefers to coordinately work with the relay rather than transmit directly. Finally, we provide visible CRs and numerical results on the exact outage performance by Monte Carlo simulations.