A Fair Relay Selection Scheme for a DF Cooperative Network With Spatially Random Relays

A new, fair relay selection scheme is proposed for a dual-hop one-way decode-and-forward network with randomly distributed relays, in a general fading environment. Most of the reported works in the literature achieve fairness at the expense of degrading the outage probability performance. In addition, they often assume that the number and locations of the relays are fixed. In contrast, the proposed scheme achieves fairness in a random field of relays without deteriorating the outage probability performance. In this scheme, each relay maintains a countdown timer whose initial value is a function of the relay location and a tunable parameter that controls the level of fairness. The optimum value of this parameter is evaluated in an offline manner so as to achieve fairness by making the average powers consumed by the relays as close as possible. An integral-form analytical expression is derived for the average power consumed by each relay. This expression is then used to show the superiority of the proposed scheme over opportunistic relaying and random relay selection schemes in having better fairness performance.