Optimized Relay Selection and Power Allocation by an Exclusive Method in Multi-Relay AF Cooperative Networks

In a single-source and multi-relay amplify-forward (AF) cooperative network, the outage probability and the power allocation are two key factors to influence the performance of an entire system. In this paper, an optimized AF relay selection by an exclusive method and near optimal power allocation (NOPA) is proposed for both good outage probability and power efficiency. Given the same power at the source and the relay nodes, a threshold for selecting the relay nodes is deduced and employed to minimize the average outage probability. It mainly excludes the relay nodes with much higher thresholds over the aforementioned threshold and thus the remainders of the relay nodes participate in cooperative forwarding efficiently. So the proposed scheme can improve the utility of the resources in the cooperative multi-relay system, as well as reduce the computational complexity. In addition, based on the proposed scheme, a NOPA is also suggested to approach sub-optimal power efficiency with low complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme obtains about 2.1dB and 5.8dB performance gain at outage probability of 10(-4), when compared with the all-relay-forward (6 participated relays) and the single-relay-forward schemes. Furthermore, it obtains the minimum outage probability among all selective relay schemes with the same number of the relays. Meanwhile, it approaches closely to the optimal exhaustive scheme, thus reduce much complexity. Moreover, the proposed NOPA scheme achieves better outage probability than those of the equal power allocation schemes. Therefore, the proposed scheme can obtain good outage probability, low computational complexity and high power efficiency, which makes it pragmatic efficiently in the single-source and multi-relay AF based cooperative networks.