Decentralized relay selection in two-user multihop decode-and-forward relay networks

In this paper, we analyze the outage and diversity performance of a low-complexity relay selection routing algorithm which applies to large-scale distributed decode-and-forward relay networks with two source-destination user pairs. We analyze a suboptimal decentralized relay selection (DRS) strategy that only utilizes local channel state information of the relays within a given hop, to select distinct multihop paths for each user pair. Specifically, we derive exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability and diversity order of the DRS algorithm which prove that the full diversity order is achieved with complexity that is quadratic with the number of relays in each hop. Illustrative analytical results are accurately validated by numerical simulations.