Proactive relay selection in distributed multi-source cooperative networks

This paper investigates proactive relay selection (PRS) in distributed cooperative networks with multiple potential relays and multiple source-destination pairs. A simple PRS scheme is proposed and its outage probability is analyzed. Compared with the reactive relay selection (RRS) scheme proposed in, our PRS scheme has a loss on the outage performance. However, its significance lies in three aspects: 1) It is fully decentralized; 2) It has less signalling overhead; 3) It saves the network energy consumption. This shows that our PRS scheme is specifically valuable to networks which do not allow centralized control and are energy constrained, such as ad hoc or sensor networks.