Adaptive relay-selection in decode-and-forward cooperative systems

In the past few years adaptive decode-and-forward cooperative diversity systems have have been studied intensively in literature. Many schemes and protocols have been proposed to enhance the performance of the cooperative systems while trying to alleviate its drawbacks. One of the recent schemes that had been shown to give high improvements in performance is the best-relay selection scheme. In the best-relay selection scheme only one relaying nodes among the relays available in the system is selected to forward the source's message to the destination. The best relay is selected as the relay node that can achieve the highest end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination node. Performance improvements have been reported as compared to regular fixed decode-and-forward relaying in which all relays are required to forward the source's message to the destination in terms of spectral efficiency and diversity order. In this thesis, we use simulations to show the improvement in the outage performance of the best-relay selection scheme.