Outage Behavior of Selective Relaying Schemes

Cooperative diversity techniques can improve the transmission rate and reliability of wireless networks. For systems employing such diversity techniques in slow-fading channels, outage probability and outage capacity are important performance measures. Existing studies have derived approximate expressions for these performance measures in different scenarios. In this paper, we derive the exact expressions for outage probabilities and outage capacities of three proactive cooperative diversity schemes that select a best relay from a set of relays to forward the information. The derived expressions are valid for arbitrary network topology and operating signal-to-noise ratio, and serve as a useful tool for network design.