On the Performance of a New Relay Selection Scheme in Multihop Cellular Networks

The cellular networks are expected to change to Multi-hop Cellular Networks (MCNs). While a mobile station and the base station have a direct link in a conventional cellular network, in MCN, mobile stations with unsatisfying path to the base station, could instead relay their data through other mobile stations with better channel conditions. This can improve coverage and capacity, and reduce the total transmission power, but its efficiency depends deeply on the relaying strategy used. This paper investigates an efficient relaying method in multihop cellular networks. In the new relay selection scheme, mobile station selects the best channel coefficient between relay station and base station in each coherence time. The performance improvement due to the proposed scheme is demonstrated through simulation results.