Performance analysis of SNR-based hybrid incremental/selection Decode-and-Forward relaying in cooperative networks

In this paper, we propose the SNR-based hybrid incremental/selection Decode-and-Forward (H-ISDF) relaying protocol. In the new protocol, the destination and the relay jointly choose relaying protocol based on the quality of the received signal at the destination and the relay, specifically, source retransmission in the second phase is allowed. We evaluate the performance of the protocol in terms of the end-to-end bit-error-rate (BER) and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) outage probability over independent non-identical flat Rayleigh fading channels. Exact closed-form expressions for the optimal relaying threshold that effectively minimizes the end-to-end BER and the outage probability of the system are derived. Monte-Carlo simulations are further provided to confirm the analytical results.