Performance analysis of multi-hop decode-and-forward relaying with selection combining

In this paper, exact closed-form expressions for outage probability and bit error probability (BEP) are presented for multi-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relaying schemes in conjunction with cooperative diversity, in which selection combining technique is employed at each node. We have shown that the proposed protocol offers remarkable diversity advantage over direct transmission as well as the conventional DF relaying schemes with the same combining technique. We then investigate the system performance when different diversity schemes are employed. It has been observed that the system performance loss due to selection combining relative to maximal ratio combining is not significant. Simulations are performed to confirm our theoretical analysis.