Performance study of cooperative diversity network with selection combining

This paper analyzes the end-to-end performance of the cooperative diversity wireless networks using the amplify-and-forward relaying and the selection combining receiver over independent Rayleigh fading channels. The performance analysis is presented in terms of the outage probability and the average bit error rate. Since it is hard to find exact closed form expressions for the outage probability and the error rate, we derive lower bounds for them. Numerical results show that the derived lower bounds for the outage probability and the average error rate are tight especially at medium and high SNR values.