Outage probability of decode-and-forward cooperative diversity over correlated shadowed fading channels

Abstract

In this letter, we investigate the effect of correlated lognormal shadowing on the outage probability of decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative diversity systems. Since there is no closed-form expression for the outage probability, we present a numerical approach to evaluate the outage probability by using a decorrelating transformation and Gaussian-Hermite integration technique. The numerical results verify that our proposed approach is accurate, and show that the correlation coefficients and standard deviations of shadowing have a significant impact on the outage performance.