C-MRC-based path selection approach for cooperative multihop communications

In this paper, we investigate a path selection approach for wireless cooperative multihop communications with one source, one destination, and multiple intermediate relaying nodes, which are clustered linearly. Specifically, we adopt a cooperative maximum ratio combining (C-MRC) technique as a framework for the path selection approach, namely a C-MRC-based approach and a modified C-MRC-based approach. The performance evaluation is performed to measure a bit error rate (BER). Simulation results indicate that the proposed modified C-MRC-based approach is superior to the C-MRC-based approach, in which the SNR gain of 2 dB is observed at BER of 10^-4.