Throughput and Energy Efficiency of Cooperative Diversity with Relay Selection

Cooperative diversity is a communication technique where a relay node provides signal diversity to the destination by retransmitting the signal received from the source. To find an optimal relay and maximize the resulting performance, a relay selection procedure is used with channel state information as a selection metric. In this paper, we model cooperative diversity with relay selection as a Markov chain, and study the impact of selection timing on throughput and energy efficiency in Rayleigh fading channels. Based on obtained results, we determine optimal relay selection schemes for various network scenarios.