Outage performance of reactive cooperation in Nakagami-m fading channels

In this paper, we investigate the outage performance of Decode-and-Forward with reactive relaying in dual-hop cooperative Nakagami-m fading links. The destination, based on the unique knowledge of local second hop channel state information, selects the best relay to increase the chances of cooperation when the direct link is also available. After deriving the exact distribution of the variables of interest, the outage probability of the system—with and without the direct link—is obtained in closed-form, and the ∈-outage capacity is derived in the particular case where the channel model is reduced to a Rayleigh fading. Simulation results confirm the accuracy of our analysis for a large selection of system and fading parameters.