Joint relay selection and link adaptation for distributed beamforming in regenerative cooperative networks

Relay selection enhances the performance of the cooperative networks by selecting the links with higher capacity. Meanwhile link adaptation improves the spectral efficiency of wireless data-centric networks through adapting the modulation and coding schemes (MCS) to the current link condition. In this paper, relay selection is combined with link adaptation for distributed beamforming in a two-hop regenerative cooperative system. A novel signaling mechanism and related optimal algorithms are proposed for joint relay selection and link adaptation. In the proposed scheme, there is no need to feedback the relay selection results to each relay. Instead, by broadcasting the link adaptation results from the destination, each relay will automatically understand whether it is selected or not. The lower and upper bounds of the throughput of the proposed scheme are derived. The analysis and simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme provides synergistic gains compared to the pure relay selection and link adaptation schemes.