Abstract
Opportunistic relaying in cooperative communication depends on careful relay selection. However the traditional centralized method used for opportunistic Amplify-and-Forward (OAF) protocols requires precise measurements of channel state information (CSI) at the destination (CSI-OAF). In this paper, we propose a distributed relay selection framework for opportunistic AF (D-OAF) cooperative communications and offer an accurate performance analysis based on exact statistics of the local signal-to-noise ratios of the best relay. Furthermore, we validate our analysis by showing that performance simulation results coincide with our analytical results over different network architectures, and we compare our new results with their CSI-based counter-parts.