Outage Performance Analysis of Multicarrier Relay Selection for Cooperative Networks

In this paper, we analyze the outage performance of two multicarrier relay selection schemes, i.e. bulk and per-subcarrier selections, for two-hop orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. To provide a comprehensive analysis, three forwarding protocols: decode-and-forward (DF), fixed-gain (FG) amplify-and-forward (AF) and variable-gain (VG) AF relay systems are considered. We obtain closed-form approximations for the outage probability and closed-form expressions for the asymptotic outage probability in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region for all cases. Our analysis is verified by Monte Carlo simulations, and provides an analytical framework for multicarrier systems with relay selection.