Low-cost relay selection in multihop cooperative networks

A best relay selection algorithm for a cooperative multi-hop cross-layer single-input single-output (SISO) amplify-and-forward (AF) wireless relay network is analyzed in this work, with the application where exact channel state information (CSI) is known. We present algorithmic strategies to simplify a multi-hop parallel SISO relay network into a series multi-hop network by finding the best path having the maximum received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The best relay selection by using dynamic programming search entails high computations and large memory requirements, as well as involves the full CSI information, making this approach impractical for large-scale networks. The goal of the proposed low-cost near-optimal routing strategy in this work is to provide close to optimal performance with much less complexity compared to traditional routing. Next, we also propose a low-cost power allocation to further improve system performance over traditional power allocation found in the literature. Computer simulations show excellent performance improvement of our proposed methods in terms of bit error rate (BER) as well as outage probability over the traditional relaying and power allocation algorithms.