Outage analysis of opportunistic relay and beamforming in DF relay networks over Nakagami-m fading channels

In this paper,the outage performance of opportunistic relay ( OR) and equal gain transmissionbeamforming(EGT-BF) are studied in decode-and-forward (DF) relay networks over Nakagami-m fadingchannels,assuming multiple relays are available in the networks.We derive the moment generation function(MGF) of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination,then obtain the exact closedformsolution of OR and the approximate closed form expression of EGT-BF in terms of outage probabilityrespectively through numerical inversion of Laplace transform.Simulation results are given to verify thecorrectness of theoretical analysis.We also compare the outage performance of OR and EGT-BF with othertransmission strategies and find that when decoding results of relays are available at the destination,OR achieves high performance and is the optimal scheme to achieve the tradeoff between performance andoverheads.When relay decoding information is unachievable,the performance of OR degrades significantly,and the EGT-BF is a more preferred scheme.