Outage probability improvement using a conditional cooperative mechanism in heterogeneous wireless networks

The self-similarity nature of network traffic has been discovered to be a ubiquitous phenomenon in communication networks; meanwhile, heterogeneous wireless cooperative relay networks have received considerable interests in both academia and industry fields. The mechanism of cooperative relay selection is very essential for the design of heterogeneous wireless relay networks. In this paper, based on the self-similar nature of network traffic in heterogeneous wireless cooperative relay network, we propose a new relay selection mechanism called conditional relay selection which can effectively decrease the system outage probability. Compared to conventional relay selection mechanism, the proposed mechanism considers the traffic queue condition of the relay nodes rather than just comparing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Through extensive comparisons with traditional cooperative relay selection mechanisms, the proposed scheme can significantly improve the system outage probability. © 2010 The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications.