Robust Relay Selection and Outage Probability Analysis for Cooperative Communications in Aircraft Approach

In this paper, we study the relay selection problem in cooperative communications in aircraft approach, whereby aircrafts in the holding stack can be selected as relays to enhance the ground-to-air communications between the control tower and the approaching aircraft. We derive the upper bound of the outage probability in cooperative communications under three different channel conditions: Rayleigh, Rician and Nakagami-m. A relay selection algorithm OPRS is proposed accordingly that attempts to find the minimum number of relays to meet the outage probability requirement. We then consider the case that the bound of the channel condition is given but the distribution is unknown. In this case, the relay selection problem is formulated as a robust optimization problem. We provide simulation results to show the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.