Performance Analysis of the Link-Adaptive Cooperative Amplify-and-Forward Relay Networks with Opportunistic Relaying Strategy

This paper analyzes the performance of cooperative amplify-and-forward (CAF) relay networks that employ adaptive M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM)/M-ary phase shift keying (M-PSK) digital modulation techniques in Nakagami-m fading channel. In particular, we present and compared the analysis of CAF relay networks with different cooperative diversity and opportunistic routing strategies such as regular Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC), Selection Diversity Combining (SDC), Opportunistic Relay Selection with Maximal Ratio Combining (ORS-MRC) and Opportunistic Relay Selection with Selection Diversity Combining (ORS-SDC). We advocate a simple yet unified numerical approach based on the marginal moment generating function (MGF) of the total received SNR to compute the average symbol error rate (ASER), mean achievable spectral efficiency, and outage probability performance metrics.