Distributed subcarrier pairing and relay selection for OFDM based cooperative relay networks

In this paper, we propose distributed subcarrier pairing and relay selection for OFDM based cooperative systems. Our objective is to maximize the throughput of the network using minimal signaling overhead when uniform power allocation is performed at the subcarriers. Since the optimal centralized solution for the formulated problem requires high signaling overhead and processing complexity, we propose two suboptimal distributed algorithms scalable and suitable for practical implementation. The first proposed algorithm is based on Hungarian method and is efficient in terms of signaling overhead reduction. The performance of this algorithm is extremely close to the optimal solution for large number of subcarriers. The second proposed distributed algorithm has lower complexity and it significantly reduces the signaling overhead at the expense of a small degradation in performance. Numerical results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and demonstrate the superiority over other existing algorithms in the literature.