Green cooperative relaying in multi-source wireless networks with high throughput and fairness provisioning

Motivated by the urgent need of green communications, this paper investigates energy-efficient cooperative relaying methods for multi-source multi-relay wireless networks. Existing cooperative relaying schemes primarily focus on single-source cooperative networks and aim to maximize diversity gain exploitation, yet ignore the extra energy consumption used by relay nodes and fairness between source nodes. Instead, our object is to minimize relay power consumption and maintain network-wide fairness without throughput penalty. The considered problem includes two parts, namely source scheduling and relay assignment that are addressed separately. We derive the feasible condition for the green source-relay assignment problem and show that it is NP-hard. We propose a heuristic algorithm that deliver good performance with low complexity. Simulation results are presented to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed scheme in terms of average throughput, throughput fairness, average relay power consumption, and average outage probability, as compared to two related schemes, under both independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and independent and non-identically distributed (i.n.d.) channel configurations.