Accurate Performance Analysis of Opportunistic Decode-and-Forward Relaying

In this paper, we investigate an opportunistic relaying scheme where the selected relay assists the source-destination (direct) communication. In our study, we consider a regenerative opportunistic relaying scheme in which the direct path can be considered unusable, and takes into account the effect of the possible erroneously detected and transmitted data at the best relay. We first derive statistics based on exact probability density function (PDF) of each hop. Then, the PDFs are used to determine accurate closed form expressions for end-to-end bit-error rate (BER) of binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) modulation. Furthermore, we evaluate the asymptotical performance analysis and the diversity order is deduced. Finally, we validate our analysis by showing that performance simulation results coincide with our analytical results over different network architectures.