Effect of Cluster Size Selection on the Throughput of Multi-Hop Cooperative Relay

We study the effect of relay cluster selection on throughout in multi-hop cooperative communications with one source and one destination. We evaluate the effective relay throughput as a function of the source transmission rate and the network outage probability. Assuming channel side information (CSI) only available at the receivers, we formulate the cluster size optimization to maximize throughput. Furthermore, since the bottleneck of the multi-hop relaying is at the first hop where there is in general a lack of cooperation from the source, for the scenario where CSI is available at the source, we may incorporate opportunistic relay selection at the first hop in the cluster optimization problem. Our results demonstrate how the optimal selection of cluster sizes can significantly increase the relaying throughput.