Abstract

The study of relaying systems has found renewed interest in the context of cooperative diversity for communication channels suffering from fading. This paper provides analytical expressions for the end-to-end SNR and outage probability of cooperative diversity in correlated lognormal channels, typically found in indoor and specific outdoor environments. The system under consideration utilizes decode-and-forward relaying and Selection Combining or Maximum Ratio Combining at the destination node. The provided expressions are used to evaluate the gains of cooperative diversity compared to noncooperation in correlated lognormal channels, taking into account the spectral and energy efficiency of the protocols and the half-duplex or full-duplex capability of the relay. Our analysis demonstrates that correlation and lognormal variances play a significant role on the performance gain of cooperative diversity against noncooperation.