Comparative study of different types of relay selection scheme for cooperative wireless communication

High data rates, large coverage area and reduce the effect of multipath fading are key points of researchers for wireless communication systems. These facilities are provided by MIMO systems. However, to implement and use multiple antennas are very difficult because of area, power consumption, and costing constraints. So, Virtual MIMO concept was introduced. In cooperative wireless networks, a virtual antenna array is created using several single antenna devices. Therefore, mostly the source and relays co-operate with each other in order to exchange information and route it to destination. In case of co-operative networks, the relay node should be chosen very carefully as it is an important task. This research works is focused towards the performance comparison of opportunistic and random relay selection schemes for cooperative communication system. Opportunistic relaying techniques based on max-min relay selection, harmonic mean relay selection, threshold based max-min and threshold based harmonic mean has been studied. These strategies are compared with random relay selection scheme. Simulation result shows that for same bit error probability, opportunistic relaying technique outperform the conventional random relay selection scheme.