Outage analysis of Dynamic Selective Decode-and-Forward in slow fading wireless relay networks

In this paper, we consider a slow fading Multiple Access Multiple Relay Channel (MAMRC) defined as follows: (1) Multiple statistically independent sources communicate with a single destination with the help of multiple half-duplex dedicated relays; (2) The links between the different nodes are independent, and subject to slow fading and additive white Gaussian noise; (3) Sources and cooperating relays interfere (non-orthogonal transmission); (4) No Channel State Information (CSI) at senders and perfect CSI at receivers is available and no feedback is allowed. We introduce an advanced Decode-and-Forward (DF) protocol, referred to as Dynamic Selective Decode and Forward (D-SDF), where each relay individually decides the end of its listening phase and the beginning of its cooperation phase based on a predefined selection strategy. We analyse the outage behavior of this protocol under the assumption that each relay sender employs joint network channel coding and each receiver implements joint network channel decoding, and demonstrate that D-SDF outperforms static SDF in a variety of transmission scenarios.