Outage Analysis of Cooperative OFDM Systems with Nonlinear Amplifiers and Relay Selection

Cooperative communications have emerged as a promising solution for wireless networks. In particular, currently there is a growing interest in amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative systems with relay selection. On the other hand, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has shown to be a key technology for future wireless communication systems. One of the main problems of OFDM systems is the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmitted signals, which may cause the introduction of nonlinear distortions due to the presence of nonlinear power amplifiers (PAs). In this paper, a theoretical analysis of the outage probability of an AF OFDM system with relay selection is developed. Our analysis takes into consideration the nonlinear distortions introduced by a nonlinear PA and shows how its parameters affects the outage probability for different SNR levels. Numerical results are provided to validate the analytical results.