Performance Analysis of Multiuser Diversity in Multiuser Two-Hop Cooperative Relay Wireless Networks

Cooperative communications significantly improve the performance of wireless network through the help of relay nodes, while multiuser diversity is an inherent diversity in multiuser systems. In this paper, we present a framework to analyze the performance of multiuser diversity in the multiuser two-hop cooperative relay networks (TCRN). Based on this framework, we derive tight closed-form expressions of outage probability and symbol error probability (SEP) for amply-and-forward (AF) protocol with multiuser diversity. Both the theoretical analysis and simulations show that in multiuser TCRN, a multiuser diversity order equals to 2K can be achieved (where K is the number of users). This conclusions help to design the scheduling methods in cooperative relay networks.