Outage optimality of opportunistic amplify-and-forward relaying

Abstract

In this paper, we show that optimal selection and transmission of a single relay among a set of multiple amplify-and-forward (AF) candidates minimize the outage probability (i.e., outage-optimal) and outperform any other strategy that involves simultaneous transmissions from more than one AF relay under an aggregate power constraint. This outage optimality demonstrates that cooperation benefits are maximized with intelligent scheduling among AF relays.