Outage capacity of best relay selection protocol for cooperative wireless networks over nonidentical Nakagami-m channels with arbitrary m

This paper investigates the outage capacity performance for cooperative wireless communication schemes over independent nonidentical Nakagami-m fading channels with arbitrary fading parameters. The network consists of multiple dual-hop nonregenerative relays in addition to a direct path to achieve the cooperative diversity with maximal ratio combining at the destination. Closed form expressions for the outage capacity probability are derived with perfect knowledge of channel state information. Exact, simple and approximate solutions for the upper and lower bounds are also derived. In almost all research done in this area, integer fading parameters with identical fading channels were assumed so far. The proposed mathematical analysis are complimented by numerical examples for outage capacity probability; including the effect of fading severity of the channel, number of acting relays, and transmitted signal-to-noise ratio.