Outage-optimal relaying through opportunistic hybrid forward cooperation

In this paper, a new scheme based on relay selection and data forwarding in multi-relay cooperative networks is introduced. Unlike most existing solutions focused on amplify-and-forward (AF) or decode-and- forward (DF) protocol separately, the proposed hybrid forward (HF) scheme takes advantage of both AF and DF protocols in relay forwarding. Based on theoretical analysis, a closed-form expression for the tight lower bound of its outage probability is derived, and further performance analysis is also presen...