Selective cooperation in dual-hop cooperative networks

Selective relaying based on instantaneous channel status is usually adopted to improve transmission performance in cooperative communication systems. However, such scheme has an extremely high computational complexity. To reduce the complexity, we propose a selective cooperation scheme to decide whether cooperative transmission should be adopted or not by utilizing statistical channel information. Three transmission mechanisms, direct transmission, decode-and-forward relaying, and amplify-and-forward relaying are considered in this investigation and ergodic capacity is used to measure the quality of communication in the theoretical analysis. In addition, a number of approximation results are derived to assist the decision process of selective cooperation. Simulation results show that the proposed transmission scheme is effective in cooperative communication networks.