To improve the reliability and efficiency in cooperative communications, a power optimized single relay selection scheme is proposed by increasing the diversity effort with an improved link-adaptive-regenerative (ILAR) protocol. The protocol determines the forwarding power of a relay node by comparing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at both sides of the node; thus it improves the power efficiency. Moreover, it also proposes a single relay selection strategy to maximize the instantaneous SNR product, which ensures the approximate best channel link quality for good relay forwarding. And the system adjusts the forwarding power in real time and also selects the best relay node participated in the cooperative forwarding. In addition, the cooperation in the protocol is analyzed and the approximate expression of the bit-error-rate (BER) and the outage probability at high SNRs are also derived. Simulation results indicate that the BER and outage probability of the relay selection scheme by the ILAR protocol outperform other contrast schemes of current existing protocols. At BER of 10−2, the proposed scheme with ILAR protocol outperforms those of the decoded-and-forward (DF), the selected DF (SDF), and the amplify-and-forward (AF) protocols by 3.5, 3.5 and 7 dB, respectively. Moreover, the outage probability of the relay system decreases with the growth of the relay number. Therefore, the proposed relay selection scheme with ILAR strategies can be properly used in cooperative communications for good reliability and high power efficiency.
Performance analysis of bi-directional relay selection strategy for wireless cooperative communications