On the Performance of Cyclic Prefix-Based Single-Carrier Cooperative Diversity Systems with Best Relay Selection

In this paper, several important performance metrics for the cyclic prefix-based single-carrier (CP-SC) cooperative diversity systems with best relay node selection, are presented and quantitatively compared with Monte-Carlo simulations. The statistical evaluation of the upper bound of the average end-to-end signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) of a two-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying CP-SC transmission is presented. By using this upper bound, closed-form bounds for the maximum achievable average rate, the outage probability and the average symbol error rate (SER), are derived. Further, asymptotic analysis on the outage probability and the average SER reveal that the diversity gain is determined by both the number of relay nodes in the system and the number of channel taps being supported by the CP length. Simulation results verify the derived closed-form analytical expressions and also the diversity gains. Asymptotic performance is also verified in practically high SNR region via Monte Carlo simulations.