Performance analysis of incremental hybrid decode-amplify-forward cooperative relaying with opportunistic relay selection under Rayleigh fading channels

This paper investigates the performance of incremental hybrid decode-amplify-forward relaying (IHDAF) protocol for the cooperative multi-relay networks. We derive a tight closed-form expression for the outage probability (OP) by employing opportunistic relay selection (ORS) under Rayleigh fading channels. An asymptotic outage expression is also derived in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime which characterizes the system diversity order. Our results reveal that the system performance improves as the number of relays increases. Numerical and simulation results verify our analytical findings, and demonstrate that the outage performance of the considered IHDAF protocol outperforms the incremental selective DF (ISDF) and incremental AF (IAF) relaying protocols.