Best available relay and user selection scheme for interference management in wireless cooperative communication networks

Cooperative communication is one of the important basics of the future wireless networks. It is used to improve communication reliability and enhance spectrum efficiency. However, the co-channel interference is still the major problem in degrading transmission performance. Thus, it becomes essential to propose an efficient technique to overcome this interference. In this paper, we introduce a novel cooperative communication scheme with interference management based on the combination of two cooperative techniques: Best Available Relay Selection (BARS) and Best Relay and User Selection (BRUS). This scheme maximizes the received signal to noise ratio (SNR), either while minimizing the interference by selecting an optimal time slot for users or while keeping the interference levels below a certain threshold. We derive exact closed form expressions for the outage probability, ergodic capacity, average consumed power and average Bit Error Probability (BEP) for the introduced cooperative scheme. Then, a comparison between the three techniques is established. Simulations are used to validate the analytical results, as well as to confirm the advantage behind this combination in enhancing interference management and improving system performance.