Outage Probability of Cooperative Communication Network with Relay Selection Over Nakagami-m Fading Channel

Cooperative diversity uses relays which assist source destination transmissions to reduce link outage rates in multipath fading environments. In this paper, an Amplify-and-Forward (AAF) cooperative communication system over Nakagami-m fading channel is considered where a source node communicates with a destination node directly and indirectly (through multiple relays). Nakagami-m fading channel works as generalized fading model. The relay selection reduces the amount of required resources. The relay node that can achieve the highest signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) at the destination node is selected so closed form expressions for the symbol error probability and outage probability are obtained from relay selection. Using numerical results, the performances curves are plotted for two values of Nakagami-m parameter which shows the significant advantages of the relay selection in a cooperative communication.