Effect of the Error Propagation on the Error Performance of Cooperative Communications with the Best Relay Selection Schemes

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how error propagation affects the error performance of cooperative communication systems using best relay selection, revealing limitations in diversity order and the importance of threshold selection.

Contribution

It derives an error propagation expression for best relay selection and evaluates its impact on system performance, highlighting the effects of error propagation and relay threshold choices.

Findings

Error propagation reduces diversity order compared to perfect decoding.

Relay threshold selection significantly influences error performance.

Best relay selection does not guarantee M+1 diversity order under error propagation.

Abstract

In this paper, error performance of the cooperative communication systems with the best relay selection scheme is investigated in the presence of error propagation from role to destination. The error propagation expression is derived firstly when the best relay is selected within M relays. The derived end-to-end BER expression is verified with the computer simulations. It is shown that the best relay selection does not ensure M+1 diversity order under the error propagation unlike perfect decoding. In addition, the threshold selection for the relays has dominant effect on the error performance of the system.