Cooperative diversity with cooperative selection-and-stay combining with multiple decode-and-forward relays

Cooperative selection-and-stay combining (CSSC) is analyzed for energy-efficient cooperative diversity with multiple decode-and-forward relays, where the relays are not activated all the time. To illustrate reception performance, BPSK signaling over independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh fading channels is considered. The bit error rate (BER) of the end-to-end reception and average relay utilization are derived, and a closed-form approximation of the BER is obtained. Numerical results of BER performance are presented and compared for different cases.