Opportunistic Decode-and-Forward Relaying With Beamforming in Two-Wave With Diffuse Power Fading

Abstract

In this paper, we propose new opportunistic decode-and-forward (DF) relaying with beamforming for multirelay networks, where an Ns-antenna source communicates with an Nd-antenna destination with the aid of N parallel single-antenna relays. Among these relays, only one relay that correctly decodes the signal from the source and has the highest instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to the destination is selected for transmission. The source employs maximum ratio transmission (MRT) to transmit, whereas the destination performs maximum ratio combining (MRC) to the received signals. To examine the benefits of the proposed scheme, we first derive the exact outage probability for independently but non-identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) two-wave with diffuse power (TWDP) fading channels. We then derive an easy-to-compute expression for the exact outage probability to reduce computational cost. Our results encompass Rayleigh and Rician fading as special cases. We further derive a compact expression for the asymptotic outage probability, which characterizes two factors governing the network performance at high SNRs, i.e., the diversity order and the array gain. We demonstrate that our scheme preserves the maximum diversity order of N × min {Ns, Nd}. Additionally, we derive the optimal power allocation factor, which provides a practical design rule to optimally distribute the total transmission power between the source and the selected relay to minimize the outage probability.