Dependence of Outage Probability of Cooperative Systems with Single Relay Selection on Channel Correlation

The relay selection method is a promising technique for improving the performance of cooperative systems. Most of the existing studies assume that wireless channels are statistically independent. However, in reality, channel correlation is more likely to be non-negligible. In this study, we investigate the dependence of the performance of cooperative systems with single relay selection in equally correlated environments. A tight upper bound of the system outage probability is given as a function of the channel correlation coefficients. We show that even though the system performance is considerably degraded in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region when the channel correlations are sufficiently large, yet less than one, the system still achieves a diversity order equal to the number of available relays.