Distributed Optimal Relay Selection for QoS Provisioning in Wireless Multi-Hop Cooperative Networks

This paper proposes a distributed optimal relay selection scheme in wireless multi-hop cooperative networks where the wireless channels are modeled as first-order finite-state Markov channels (FSMCs) and adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) is applied. The FSMC model is used to approximate the time variations of the average received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The state of a relay consists of the channel states of both source-to-relay and relay-to-destination links. In this scheme, a stochastic decision making approach is taken to select the optimal relay according to the states of all available relays with the quality of service (QoS) optimization goals of mitigating error propagation and increasing spectral efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing scheme.