In this paper, an Alamouti-coded decode-and-forward protocol with optimum relay selection for three-user one destination cooperative communications is investigated. Particularly, we design the new protocol that allows the source node retransmitting the signal to the destination node at the same time as the relay node forwarding the received signal to the destination node with an Alamouti coding scheme. We exploit the cooperative maximum ratio combining technique (C-MRC) at the destination for combining a multiple copy of received signals. Therefore, the proposed scheme achieves the maximum diversity gain and lower probability of error in comparison with the existing decode and forward protocol. We also analyze a symbol error rate (SER) upper bound of the single relay system, and exploit a result of this analysis to select the optimum relay in a multiple-relay cooperation scheme based on the minimum SER selection strategy. Moreover, the optimum power allocation for the proposed protocol is derived, and it is able to provide the optimum transmission power strategy to the source and the relay nodes in order to achieve the minimum probability of error. In the performance analysis, the theoretical error probability is studied and compared with the simulation results. Simulation results indicate that the proposed protocol significantly outperforms the existing protocols, and the theoretical error probability curve is relatively close to the simulated SER curve.

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