Novel relay ordering mechanisms in multi-node cooperative relaying wireless networks

This paper introduces algorithms to find relay ordering in a multi-hop cooperative diversity network. We first describe an optimal relay ordering algorithm for this multi-branch multi-hop cooperative diversity network. The optimum algorithm has a very high complexity that makes it hard to implement when being used in an environment with a large number of relays. Thus, we propose algorithms to reduce the complexity and its performance are close to optimum one. SER and error probability of selected relay ordering of the proposed algorithms are shown to demonstrate the capability of the proposed algorithm.