Opportunistic decode-and-forward relaying with interferences at relays

In this paper, a decode-and-forward cooperative interference-limited multiple relay network is considered. An efficient relay selection strategy and its performance analysis are proposed, where only the relay nodes are affected by multiple interferences. In the proposed relay selection scheme, the selected relay is not always used, depending on the power of interferences and the channel state information of all links, while the direct path between source and destination is always used. For analytical tractability the distribution of interference-limited channel is approximated as an exponential distribution with high accuracy. Analysis of cooperative networks with interference-limited relays can be performed using the approximate exponential distribution by the same methods which have been used without interferences. We derive the bit error probability and outage probability of the proposed opportunistic max-min relay selection (OMRS) scheme in independent non-identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results present the superiority of OMRS over the conventional relay selection scheme which always uses the selected relay path. The exactness of the approximate analysis for interference-limited relays is also shown in numerical results.