Performance Analysis of Cooperative Networks in Shadowed Fading with Co-Channel Interference

In this paper the performance of a cooperative communication system operating over a composite fading environment and is also subject to interference is investigated. More specifically, assuming a decode-and-forward (multi-relay) cooperative network with relay selection, exact and approximated expressions are derived for the cumulative distribution function of the output signal to interference plus noise ratio. Based on these expressions, the outage and the average bit error probabilities of the system under consideration are studied and used to obtain various numerical performance evaluation results, depicting in all cases the usefulness of the proposed approach.