A low-cost link-selection strategy for cellular controlled short-range communications

This paper is concerned with a composite network architecture of the state-of-the-art cellular network and the short-range communication system, which is referred to as the cellular controlled short-range communication (CCSRC) system in literatures. Although CCSRC systems can provide a significant performance gain over the traditional cellular systems, it is difficult to obtain such a gain in practice because these systems need to know channel state information (CSI) of all users perfectly and the complexity of selecting the optimal communication link is rather high. To solve this problem, we propose a novel link-selection strategy, which is based on the distances between each pair of users and has a very low complexity (i.e., square complexity with respect to the number of potentially cooperating users). Simulation results show that the performance of such a strategy is close to that of the optimal one.