An Efficient Partner Selection Method to Overcome the Interference Effect in Wireless Networks

In this paper, through a mathematical analysis of the overall links capacity equation, we present an efficient partner selection criterion in a cooperative communication scheme with a time-varying fading channel and severe interference on the cooperative links to mitigate the interference effect without the need for additional power consumption to transmit the information signal. For the partner(s) selection, we examine different selection criteria based on minimizing the error rate and maximizing the end-to-end system capacity to collaborate in the delivery process. We prove that in the proposed relay scheme, a simple selection criterion independent of the interference state is a sufficient and efficient criterion for selecting the partners out of terminals suffering from interference. It is found that the use of a simple and efficient selection criterion for assigning multiple cooperating terminals is able to achieve a significant diversity gain, conserve the energy of individual terminals, and improve the error performance with low computational complexity, even in the absence of the interference state information. All of the theoretical findings are verified through simulation studies.