With the fast development of today’s multimedia services, engineers face a huge hurdle that is, the overwhelming need of highly reliable communication over long distances. Cooperative communication is a novel concept which tackles this problem effectively. The direct link is assisted by nodes called relays, which also reduce shadowing and pathloss effects in wireless networks. An added advantage of such a cooperative communication network is that when combined with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna systems and cognitive radio networks (CRN), the system performance in terms of spectral efficiency and reliability, can be extremely enhanced without any extra power and spectrum.The concept of cooperative communications in MIMO and CRN systems has gained immense interest in the literature. Most of the research works have assumed Rayleigh fading conditions. In this thesis, the performance of cooperative communications with practical constraints of shadowing is studied. Analytical expressions for the outage probability of cooperative networks under different relaying protocols with selection combining are presented under the assumption of κ − µ shadowing fading. Specifically, the relaying protocols that are investigated are incremental relaying, opportunistic relaying, adaptive amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward. Furthermore, this system model is simulated and the simulation results are compared with the analytical results. Mathematica, a technical computing tool, is used for numerical estimations using stochastic processes and probability theory. Simulation is done in MATLAB.In this thesis, along with the analytical framework for evaluating outage probability for the system is presented. Simulations are performed for various fading parameters and the results closely match with analytical results which validate the derivations.