Opportunistic relay selection for wireless cooperative network

Abstract

Advances in wireless technologies, including more powerful devices and low cost radio technologies, have potential to drive a ubiquitous utilization of Internet services. Nevertheless, wireless technologies face performance limitations due to unstable wireless conditions and mobility of devices. In face of multi-path propagation and low data rate stations, cooperative relaying promises gains in performance and reliability for low-cost single antenna devices. However, cooperation procedures may be very unstable when relay selection relies on current Channel State Information (CSI) and is agnostic of interference induced by concurrent transmissions and local CPU load. As a result, the performance of cooperative relaying in realistic scenarios may be very different from interference-free scenarios that have been the focus of most of the existing proposals so far. In a clear contrast to prior art we propose an opportunistic relay selection mechanism that is aware of interference and agnostic of channel status. © 2012 IEEE.