Outage Analysis of Multi-Relay Networks With Hardware Impairments Using SECps Scheduling Scheme in Shadowed-Rician Channel

In this paper, we investigate the effect of hardware impairments on the performance of dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF)/decode-and-forward (DF) multiple relaying networks using switch-and-examine combining with post-selection (SECps) scheduling scheme in shadowed-Rician (SR) channel. Moreover, we consider a more general network, where the hard impairments are both considered at source, relays, and destination. Specifically, to decrease the high-implementation cost, the SECps scheme is adopted to choose an appropriate relay. To evaluate the performance of the considered system, we derive the novel closed-form expression of the outage probability for the AF and DF protocol, respectively. We also derive the asymptotic outage probability results at high SNRs for the DF protocol, which provides a fast way to evaluate the impact of hardware impairments on the dual-hop relay networks in the SR channel. In addition, simulation results are given to validate the correctness of the analytical results.