Performance analysis of opportunistic incremental relaying with adaptive modulation over cooperative networks

Opportunistic relaying and incremental relaying over cooperative network were introduced as efficient relaying protocols to increase the system capacity and performance. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic incremental relaying scheme in conjunction with adaptive modulation, and provide its performance analysis in terms of average spectral efficiency, average bit error rate, and outage probability. For more tractable analysis, we start with an upper bound for the combined signal-to-noise ratio at the destination and derive closed-form expressions for Rayleigh fading conditions. Our analytical-based numerical results are validated by some selected computer-based simulations.