User scheduling and relay selection with fairness concerns in multi-source cooperative networks

In this paper, we consider user scheduling and relay selection with fairness concerns in a multi-source cooperative network, where sources take turns to deliver their information to the base station and then relays help to forward their corresponding source's message under system scheduling decision. We investigate the maximum achievable rate as the system objective and propose a suboptimal algorithm to solve the optimization problems by distributing source time slots using perfect matching method, and selecting relays to help transmission in appropriate time slots of relay stage using exhaustive or simplified algorithm, respectively. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the short-term transmission fairness while maintaining comparable system performance with the traditional scheme.