Performance analysis of opportunistic nonregenerative relaying

Opportunistic relaying in cooperative communication depends on careful relay selection. However, the traditional centralized method used for opportunistic amplify-and-forward protocols requires precise measurements of channel state information at the destination. In this paper, we adopt the max-min criterion as a relay selection framework for opportunistic amplify-and-forward cooperative communications, which was exhaustively used for the decode-and-forward protocol, and offer an accurate performance analysis based on exact statistics of the local signal-to-noise ratios of the best relay. Furthermore, we evaluate the asymptotical performance and deduce the diversity order of our proposed scheme. Finally, we validate our analysis by showing that performance simulation results coincide with our analytical results over Rayleigh fading channels, and we compare the max-min relay selection with their centralized channel state information-based and partial relay selection counterparts.