Relay Selection and Performance Analysis in Multiple-User Networks

This paper investigates the relay selection (RS) problem in networks with multiple users and multiple common amplify-and-forward (AF) relays. We first give an optimality measure for RS in multiple-user relay networks. An optimal RS (ORS) algorithm is then provided, which is an extension of an RS scheme in the literature that maximizes the minimum end-to-end receive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of all users. The complexity of the ORS is quadratic in both the number of users and the number of relays. A suboptimal RS (SRS) scheme is also proposed, which has linear complexity in the number of relays and quadratic complexity in the number of users. Furthermore, diversity orders of both the ORS and the proposed SRS are derived and compared with those of a naive RS scheme and the single-user case. The ORS is shown to achieve full diversity, while the diversity order of the SRS decreases with the number of users. For two-user networks, the closed-form outage probabilities and array gains corresponding to the minimum SNR of the users in the RS schemes are derived. It is proved that the advantage of the SRS over the naive RS scheme increases as the number of relays in the network increases. Simulation results are provided to corroborate the analytical results.