Outage-Optimal Cooperative Communications with Regenerative Relays

In this paper, we put forth simple opportunistic relaying with decode-and-forward (DaF) or regenerative processing strategy, under an aggregate power constraint. In particular, we consider distributed relay-selection algorithms requiring only local channel knowledge. We prove that opportunistic single relay selection with DaF strategy is outage-optimal, that is, it is equivalent in outage behavior to the optimal DaF strategy that employs all potential relays.