Optimum Location-Based Relay Selection in Wireless Networks

This paper studies the performance and key structural properties of the optimum location-based relay selection policy for wireless networks consisting of homogeneous Poisson distributed relays. The distribution of the channel quality indicator at the optimum relay location is obtained. A threshold-based distributed selective feedback policy is proposed for the discovery of the optimum relay location with finite average feedback load. It is established that the total number of relays feeding back obeys a Poisson distribution and an analytical expression for the average feedback load is derived. The analytical expressions for the average rate and outage probability with and without selective feedback are obtained for general path-loss models. It is shown that the optimum location-based relay selection policy outperforms other common relay selection strategies notably. It is also shown that utilizing location information from five relays on average is enough to achieve almost the same performance with the infinite feedback load case. As generalizations, isotropic Poisson point processes and heterogeneous source-to-relay and relay-to-destination links are also studied.