Performance analysis of novel generalized selection combining in amplify-and-forward cooperative communications

This paper presents an novel iterative generalized selection combining (IGSC) for amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative communications based on error detection and rearranging the SNR of indirect link in decreasing order of magnitude. The destination node decides whether to accept incoming path or not in every time frame to reduce the excessive burden of maximal ratio combining (MRC) with all diversity paths. The incoming path is rearranged by the decreasing order of magnitude. Because of the computational complexity of the outage probability, we derive the upper and lower bound of the outage probability. The tightness of the upper bound is verified by Monte Carlo simulation. Numerical and simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional MRC in terms of outage probability.