Spectral efficiency of distributed cooperative relaying

Cooperative relaying has been shown to be an effective method to combat fading in wireless communications. Among relaying strategies, distributed ones are more attractive because of the simplicity, scalability, robustness and low overhead incurred. In this paper, two previously proposed distributed relaying strategies are investigated: Timer-based Best-Select relaying and M-group Dis-STBC All-Select relaying. The motivation is to figure out which one of these two strategies performs better in spectrum-limited systems, taking into account the overhead incurred in the selection process. Numerical results indicate that, in general cases, M-group Dis-STBC All-Select relaying outperforms Timer-based Best-Select relaying.