Average outage and non-outage duration of selective decode-and-forward relaying

In this paper, assuming transmission with fixed rate and fixed power, we derive the average duration of capacity outage and non-outage events of selective decode-and-forward relaying with repetition coding over slow Rayleigh fading channels. Furthermore, we develop high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) approximations for both durations which provide significant insight into the impact of various system and channel parameters. For high SNR, on a double logarithmic scale, both the average outage duration (AOD) and the average non-outage duration (ANOD) become straight lines when plotted as functions of the SNR. However, while the slope of the ANOD improves with increasing diversity order, the slope of the AOD is −1/2 independent of the diversity order.