Performance Evaluation of Half-Duplex Relay-Based Opportunistic Cooperation Diversity

Cooperative diversity is proposed as a means to improve the wireless transmission performance, which can effectively combat the wireless fading through sharing the antennas between source and relay nodes. In this paper, considering the practicability, the authors investigate the use of half-duplex relay, rather than full-duplex relay, for the opportunistic cooperation diversity. Two combining methods, namely Selection Diversity Combining (SDC) and Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC), are utilized for the implementation of the half-duplex relay-based opportunistic cooperation. Closed-form expressions of outage probability are derived for the proposed opportunistic cooperation as well as the known deterministic cooperation over Rayleigh fading channels.