Relay Selection Strategies for Multi-hop Cooperative Networks

In this dissertation we consider several relay selection strategies for multi-hop cooperative networks. The relay selection strategies we propose do not require a central controller (CC). Instead, the relay selection is on a hop-by-hop basis. As such, these strategies can be implemented in a distributed manner. Therefore, increasing the number of hops in the network would not increase the complexity or time consumed for the relay selection procedure of each hop. We first investigate the performance of a hop-by-hop relay selection strategy for multi-hop decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative networks. In each relay cluster, relays that successfully receive and decode the message from the previous hop form a decoding set for relaying, and the relay which has the highest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) link to the next hop is then selected for retransmission. We analyze the performance of this method in terms of end-to-end outage probability, and we derive approximations for the ergodic capacity and the effective ergodic capacity of this strategy. Next we propose a novel hop-by-hop relay selection strategy where the relay in the decoding set with the largest number of ``good\u27\u27 channels to the next stage is selected for retransmission. We analyze the performance of this method in terms of end-to-end outage probability in the case of perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI). We also investigate relay selection strategies in underlay spectrum sharing cognitive relay networks. We consider a two-hop DF cognitive relay network with a constraint on the interference to the primary user. The outage probability of the secondary user and the interference probability at the primary user are analyzed under imperfect CSI scenario. Finally we introduce a hop-by-hop relay selection strategy for underlay spectrum sharing multi-hop relay networks. Relay selection in each stage is only based on the CSI in that hop. It is shown that in terms of outage probability, the performance of this method is nearly optimal