Outage analysis of multi-node amplify-and-forward relay networks

In this paper, we consider the outage probability analysis of multi-node amplify-and-forward relay network with N relay nodes helping the source. We consider a system in which each relay node amplifies the source signal only. We obtain an approximation for the outage probability which is tight at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This tight outage approximation shows that the system can achieve a maximum diversity of order N+1. For the case of N = 1, our approach gives the same result obtained previously by Laneman et al. for the single relay scenario.