Enhanced relay selection decision for cooperative communication in energy constrained networks

Most of current works related to relay selection algorithms in cooperative communications use the Channel State Information (CSI) to decide whether to use one or another neighbor as a relay. Therefore in wireless sensor networks where the energy is the major constraint such algorithms may lead to quick battery drain of the nodes having the best links. In this paper we propose to enhance the relay selection decision process by taking into account the energy metric in addition to CSI. The results show that we can redistribute the consumed energy when we use the energy as a relay selection metric.