Battery-aware energy efficiency of incremental decode-and-forward with relay selection

We analyze the energy efficiency of reactive and proactive relay selection algorithms under the incremental decode-and-forward protocol. By taking into account the consumption of the RF circuitry, the transmit power, and a nonlinear model for the battery, we show that a large number of available relays can actually compromise the energy efficiency of the system. Our results show that, depending on the source to destination distance, it may be preferable to consider only a small subset of nodes and select the relay among these nodes.