Exact performance analysis of decode-and-forward opportunistic relaying

In this paper, we investigate a dual-hop decode-and-forward opportunistic relaying scheme where the source may or may not be able to communicate directly with the destination. In our study, we consider a regenerative relaying scheme in which the decision to cooperate takes into account the effect of the possible erroneously detected and transmitted data at the best relay. We derive an exact closed-form expression for the end-to-end bit-error rate (BER) of binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) modulation based on the exact statistics of each hop. Unlike existing works where the analysis focused on high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, such results are important to enable the designers to take decisions regarding practical systems that operate at low SNR regime. We show that performance simulation results coincide with our analytical results.