Improved-throughput opportunistic transmission protocol for cooperative communication systems with a preferable-link switching combining

In this article, we propose an opportunistic transmission protocol for cooperative communication systems with L relay nodes under the influence of fading channels. Unlike the protocols previously known in the literature, and given the fact that direct single-link communication outperforms multilink cooperative communication in terms of throughput for same channel conditions, we adopt the channel conditions of the direct link as a main criterion to use whether the direct link in the transmission or the indirect cooperative link. Different performance metrics are derived to demonstrate the performance of the proposed protocol along with a switching combining with a preferable link scheme. These metrics include the bit error rate (BER), outage probability, signal to interference noise ratio (SNR) gain, average throughput and the sum SNR-throughput product (SSTP). The latter performance metric is introduced to compare the maximum achievable throughput as well as the SNR range at a given quality of service (QoS). Our results show that the proposed opportunistic protocol improves the throughput as compared to the conventional cooperative communication systems for the whole range of average SNR. On the other hand, it improves the coverage range as compared to the direct link communication.