Opportunistic relay selection for rateless-coded cooperative relaying

Cooperative relaying has the potential to enhance wireless link throughput, while rateless-coded transmission adapts to the wireless channel automatically. The combination of both holds promising performance enhancement for practical wireless communications. Relay selection is a challenging issue in conventional cooperative communications and attracts extensive research. However, there is little literature on the investigation of relay selection in the context of rateless-coded cooperative relaying. We argue that the relay selection scheme for the conventional cooperative relaying is suboptimal when being applied to the rateless-coded cooperative relaying due to their fundamental differences in signal processing. In this paper, we propose a relay selection scheme specifically for rateless-coded cooperative relaying. The relay selection protocol is devised and the associated selection criterion is derived. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed relay selection scheme outperforms other existing ones in literature, therefore justifying our arguments.