Adaptive Multiple Relay Selection Scheme for Cooperative Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose an output-threshold multiple relay selection scheme for dual-hop multi-branch cooperative wireless networks. The proposed scheme selects the first L
_c
arbitrary ordered relays out of L relays such that the maximal ratio combined signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) of the L
_c
relayed paths and the direct path barely exceeds a preset threshold. Closed-form expressions are derived for the cumulative distribution function, the probability density function, and the moment generating function of an output SNR upper bound for independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading. Lower bounds for the outage probability, the average symbol error rate, and the average number of selected relays are also derived. Moreover, upper bounds for the average output SNR and the ergodic capacity are also derived. The analytical results are verified via the Monte-Carlo simulation. The performance of our proposed scheme is compared to that of the existing relay selection schemes. The proposed schemes provide more flexibility in utilizing bandwidth and spatial diversity in cooperative wireless networks.