Relay Assignment for Max-Min Capacity in Cooperative Wireless Networks

This paper is concerned with the problem of relay assignment in cooperative wireless networks having multiple sources, multiple relays, and a single destination. With the objective of maximizing the minimum capacity among all sources in the network, a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem is formulated, which can be solved by standard branch-and-bound algorithms. To reduce computational complexity, a greedy solution in the form of a lexicographic bottleneck assignment algorithm is proposed. Simulation results obtained for the IEEE 802.16j uplink scenarios show that the greedy algorithm performs very close to the optimal solution but at a much lower computational cost. The proposed greedy solution can also be tailored to provide further improvements on other network performance criteria.