Outage performance of Switch and Stay Combining scheme for multi-antenna relay network

Cooperative relaying is emerging an attractive solution for range extension, reduction in transmitted power, combat the multi-path fading and distributed radio sensing for cognitive radio system. A basic relaying system comprise of a three node network having a source, a relay and a destination. In this paper we investigate the outage performance of such system when the relay is having multiple receive antennas and operates in decode and forward mode. In particular, we study the outage performance of Switch and Stay Combining (SSC) scheme in the context of a multi-antenna relay and compare its performance with SC and MRC. SSC, because of its simplicity of implementation is an attractive scheme when the destination is a single antenna tiny wireless node. Effect of relay position and number of antennas on the relay have also been investigated.