Interference-Aware Relay Assignment for Cooperative Networks

Recently, cooperative communication is shown to be a promising approach to improve the transmission’s bandwidth without additional antennas on each node. Under this communication paradigm, the selection of relay nodes significantly affects the network throughput. As interfer-ence will greatly decrease the link’s rate, this paper stud-ies the interference-aware relay node assignment problem for multiple transmission pairs which compete for a set of relay nodes to achieve the Max-Min fairness. The main contribution of this paper is formulation of interference- aware relay node assignment problem and development of a heuristic algorithm, called as IRA. This algorithm first assigns an appropriate weight for each transmission pair and enhances the minimum bandwidth of all transmission pairs by an iterative process. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the bandwidth provision at least 21.6% and 42.5% compared with ORA algorithm and the direct transmission scheme respectively.