Performance of Hybrid Selection and Switch-and-Stay Combining With Decode-and-Forward Relaying

Abstract

In this letter, an uncoded cooperative diversity system with a source, two decode-and-forward (DF) relays, and a destination (D) is considered. We propose a hybrid selection and switch-and-stay combining (HSSSC) scheme at D. Furthermore, we also derive the exact symbol error probability (SEP) of this scheme for DF relaying over slow and flat Rayleigh fading channels considering <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="TeX">$M$</tex-math></inline-formula> -ary phase-shift keying (MPSK) signaling using paired error approach. Numerical results reveal that full diversity order is achieved in the case of HSSSC scheme and improvement in the SEP performance is observed when compared to the distributed selection combining (SC), distributed scaled selection combining, and distributed switch-and-stay combining schemes proposed in the literature. In addition, the HSSSC scheme requires less channel state information (CSI) at D compared to the distributed full CSI SC scheme proposed in the literature.