Abstract—To improve the problems of noise amplification and error propagation of the fixed cooperation schemes in cooperative communications, a relay selection strategy is proposed based on the hybrid decode-amplify-forward protocol. It can adaptively determine cooperation schemes according to the Channel Status Information (CSI) of the source-relay. Then it selects the best relay from the candidate relay set of the two fixed cooperation schemes, for a maximum Signal-Noise Ratio (SNR) in the destination. The theoretical analyses and the simulation results all show that the proposed strategy can improve the performance of the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) and the outage probability significantly, when compared with the relay selection strategies of the fixed cooperation schemes. Also it performs excellent with the increased number of the relays.

Index Terms—Amplify-and-Forward, decode-and-forward, hybrid decode-amplify forward, BER, outage probability

Cite: Jianwu Zhang, Jing Jiang, Jianrong Bao, Bin Jiang, and Chao Liu, “Improved Relay Selection Strategy for Hybrid Decode-Amplify Forward Protocol," Journal of Communications, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 297-304, 2016. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.11.3.297-304