Throughput-efficient Online Relay Selection for Dual-hop Cooperative Networks

This paper presents a design for a throughput-efficient online relay selection scheme for dual-hop multi-relay cooperative networks. Problems arise with these networks due to unpredictability of the relaying link quality and high time-consumption to probe the dual-hop link. In this paper, we firstly propose a novel probing and relaying protocol, which greatly reduces the overhead of the dual-hop link estimation by leveraging the wireless broadcasting nature of the network. We then formulate an opportunistic relay selection process for the online decision-making, which uses a tradeoff between obtaining more link information to establish better cooperative relaying and minimizing the time cost for dual-hop link estimation to achieve higher throughput. Dynamic programming is used to construct the throughput-optimal control policy for a typically heterogeneous Rayleigh fading environment, and determines which relay to probe and when to transmit the data. Additionally, we extend the main results to mixed Rayleigh/Rician link scenarios, i.e., where one side of the relaying link experiences Rayleigh fading while the other has Rician distribution. Numerical results validate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed relaying scheme, e.g., it achieves at least 107% throughput gain compared with the state of the art solution.