Outage Probability of Opportunistic Relaying in Poisson Wireless Networks

Abstract

In this paper, the performance of opportunistic decode-and-forward relaying network over Rayleigh fading channels is analyzed. We assume that the intermediate relay nodes are distributed according to a homogeneous Poisson point process with fixed density. We also consider a sectorized relay selection region to reduce the signaling overhead (e.g., link quality feedback) for establishing reliable connections between the source and destination. The "best relay" is selected among those potential relay nodes that lie in this region such that can achieve the highest signal-to-noise ratio at the destination node. In particular, the density of the potential relay nodes and the closed-form expression for outage probability of the system with maximal ratio combining (MRC) receiver at the destination, is derived based on the theory of point processes. Our results demonstrate that cooperative communication with MRC receiver deliver significant performance gains compared to direct transmission in spatially random networks. Simulation results show the validity of the analysis and point out the effect of key system parameters on the outage probability of the system.