Outage Capacity Analysis for Cooperative DF and AF Relaying in Dissimilar Rayleigh Fading Channels

Cooperative relaying permits one or more relay to transmit a signal from the source to the destination, thereby increasing network coverage and spectral efficiency. The performance of cooperative relaying is often measured as outage probability. However, appropriate measure for the channel quality is outage capacity. Although the outage probability for cooperative relaying protocol has been analyzed before, very little research has been addressed for the outage capacity. This paper is the first of its kind to derive a closed-form analytical solution of outage capacity using fixed decode and forward relaying and amplify and forward relaying in dissimilar Rayleigh fading channels, considering channel coefficients known to the receiver side. The analytical results show a tradeoff between the SNR and the number of relays for specific outage capacity. A comparison between decode and forward relaying and amplify and forward relaying shows that decode and forward relaying outperforms amplify and forward relaying for a large number of relays.