Exploiting Multiuser Diversity in Wireless Cooperative Networks

In this paper, we present a framework to analyze the outage performance of the cooperative systems exploiting multiuser diversity (MUD). A two-hop wireless network consisting of a destination node, a relay node and multiple source nodes is considered. The asymptotic expressions of the system outage probability are derived for amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols. From these expressions it is shown that the diversity orders of K+1 and K can be achieved for AF and DF, respectively, where K is the number of source nodes in the network.