A novel distributed fair relay selection strategy for cooperative wireless system

In this paper, we design a distributed relay selection strategy to achieve equal power consumption for all available relay nodes in AF cooperative system. This strategy gives a closed-form expression for the weight coefficient introduced to achieve the required fairness. It aims to reduce the complexity of the conventional centralized strategy that also tries to divide the total consumed power equally among the relay nodes but requires a knowledge of the average signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of the relay path for all relay nodes, a central controller, and a numerical equation-solving method to find the corresponding weight coefficient for each relay node. We show that our distributed strategy can divide the power consumption fairly and approach the equal average power consumption when only the average SNRs of the relay path are known locally. Also we show that our proposed strategy still provides similar outage probability as that provided by the conventional one.