A General Analytical Approach for Opportunistic Cooperative Systems with Spatially Random Relays

This paper investigates an opportunistic cooperative system with multiple relays. The locations of the relays are essentially random due to their unpredictable mobility and are thus assumed to form a spatial Poisson process. A general analytical approach to performance analysis is developed to accommodate the randomness of the locations as well as the underlying channels. The outage probability of the system is derived based on the theory of point processes. In particular, two relay selection criteria, namely the best forward channel selection and the best worse channel selection, are used as examples to illustrate the proposed approach. The accuracy of the analytical results is verified by Monte-Carlo simulations with various system configurations.