Relay selection considering successive packets transmission in cooperative communication networks

Relay selection has been regarded as an effective method to improve the performance of cooperative communication system. However, frequent operation of relay selection can bring enormous control message overhead and thereby decrease the performance of cooperative communication. To reduce the relay selection frequency, in this paper, we propose a relay selection scheme to choose the best relay with considering successive packets transmission. In this scheme, according to the length of data packet, data transmission rate and the estimated channel state information (CSI), the best relay is selected to maximize the number of successive packets transmission under the condition that the given symbol-error-rate (SER) is kept. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed relay selection scheme can support the operation of successive packets transmission in cooperative wireless networks and that the maximum number of successive packets transmission is affected by the different network parameters, i.e., data transmission rate, packet length and Doppler frequency at one relay node.