Performance Analysis of Hybrid Relay Selection in Cooperative Wireless Systems

The hybrid relay selection (HRS) scheme, which adaptively chooses amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols, is very effective to achieve robust performance in wireless networks. This paper analyzes the frame error rate (FER) of the HRS scheme in general cooperative wireless networks without and with utilizing error control coding at the source node. We first develop an improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold-based FER approximation model. Then, we derive an analytical average FER expression as well as an asymptotic expression at high SNR for the HRS scheme and generalize to other relaying schemes. Simulation results are in excellent agreement with the theoretical analysis, which validates the derived FER expressions.