Outage probability and channel capacity for the Nth best relay selection AF relaying over INID Rayleigh fading channels

Cooperative diversity systems have recently been proposed as a way to form virtual antenna schemes without utilizing collocated multiple antennas. In this paper, we consider the Nth best opportunistic amplify‐and‐forward (AF) cooperative diversity systems. The AF type can be regarded as one on the basis of modified channel state information. Wireless channels between any pair of nodes (i.e., direct and dual hop links) are assumed quasi‐static independent and nonidentically distributed (INID) Rayleigh fading. The best opportunistic AF (OAF) scheme requires two phases of transmission. During the first phase, the source node transmits a signal to all relays and the destination. In the second phase, the best relay is only selected on the basis of highest signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) scheme to forward the source signal to the destination. Therefore, the indirect link (i.e., source‐selected relay destination) can give the highest received SNR. However, the best relay selection cannot be available so that we might choose the second, third, or generally the Nth best relay. In this paper, we derive the approximated outage probability and channel capacity for the Nth best OAF relay systems over INID Rayleigh fading channels. At first, the indirect link's received SNR is approximated as harmonic mean upper bound. With this information, we obtain the given relay's Nth best selection probability as the closed form. Finally, both outage probability and channel capacity are derived as the closed forms. Simulation results are finally presented to validate the analysis. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.