On the Performance of Selection Cooperation with Imperfect Channel Estimation

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the performance of selection cooperation in the presence of imperfect channel estimation. In particular, we consider a cooperative scenario with multiple relays and amplify-and- forward protocol over frequency flat fading channels. In the selection scheme, only the "best" relay which maximizes the effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver end is selected. We present lower and upper bounds on the effective SNR and derive closed-form expressions for the average symbol error rate (ASER), outage probability and average capacity per bandwidth of the received signal in the presence of channel estimation errors. A simulation study is presented to corroborate the analytical results and to demonstrate the performance of relay selection with imperfect channel estimation.