Outage Rate and Outage Duration of Decode-and-Forward Cooperative Diversity Systems

A complete evaluation of the benefits of cooperative diversity schemes should not only include the outage and error rate performance but also the second-order statistics of the achievable information-theoretic capacity. In a non-ergodic fading channel, the system is said to be in outage when the destination cannot decode the fixed-rate transmitted signal with negligible error probability. Because of the Doppler effect, which is induced by the mobility of the wireless nodes, these capacity outage events are correlated. In this paper, we derive the average outage rate (AOR) and the average outage duration (AOD) of two well-known cooperative diversity protocols, decode-and-forward relaying and selection decode-and-forward relaying, operating in slow Rayleigh fading channels. We also analyze the asymptotic behavior of these statistical parameters for high SNRs, where it is shown that the AOR exhibits a similar behavior as the outage probability.