Cooperative communications with outage-optimal opportunistic relaying

In this paper, we present simple opportunistic relaying with decode-and-forward (DaF) and amplify-and-forward (AaF) strategies under an aggregate power constraint. In particular, we consider distributed relay-selection algorithms requiring only local channel knowledge. We show that opportunistic DaF relaying is outage-optimal, that is, it is equivalent in outage behavior to the optimal DaF strategy that employs all potential relays. We further show that opportunistic AaF relaying is outage-optimal among single-relay selection methods and significantly outperforms an AaF strategy based on equal-power multiple-relay transmissions with local channel knowledge. These findings reveal that cooperation offers diversity benefits even when cooperative relays choose not to transmit but rather choose to cooperatively listen; they act as passive relays and give priority to the transmission of a single opportunistic relay. Numerical and simulation results are presented to verify our analysis.