Performance analysis of a selection cooperation scheme in multi-source multi-relay networks

Cooperative diversity is a promising technique to form virtual antenna array without using collated multiple antennas. In this paper, we consider a joint selection scheme in multi-source multi-relay networks, in which the best source node and the best relay node are selected to access channel. The destination node uses this scheme to reduce the excessive burden of maximal ratio combining (MRC) with all source nodes and relay nodes. We derive the asymptotic expressions for the system with amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol and exact expressions for the system with decode-and-forward (DF) protocol. Numerical and simulation results show that the performance of the proposed scheme is proportional to the number of independent relay nodes or source nodes. Furthermore, one can see that the relay plays a more important role than the source on the performance of outage probability and symbol error probability (SER) in multi-source multi-relay networks.