A Unified Framework for the Analysis of Path Selection Based DF Cooperation in Wireless Systems

This paper considers path selection based decodeand- forward (DF) cooperation for wireless communication in which the source chooses either of the direct source-destination or source-relay-destination links for signal transmission. A novel aspect of the work under consideration is that it proposes a comprehensive unified framework, which is applicable for several PHY layer schemes, unlike comparative works in existing literature which are restricted to specific PHY layer schemes and thus cannot be generalized. An asymptotic generalized bound is derived for the end-to-end symbol error rate performance for cooperation over arbitrarily distributed source-destination, sourcerelay, relay-destination fading links. Also, the ensuing diversity order as well as optimal source-relay power allocation is derived for cooperative communication. The flexibility arising from the unified nature of the proposed framework is demonstrated by illustrating its applicability across a wide range of disparate systems such as MIMO-OSTBC, Joint Transmit-Receive Antenna Path Selection (JTRAPS), and Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication (HSTC). Simulation results are presented in the end to validate the performance of the system.