Fairness study on two-hop selection cooperation in wireless network

The traditional selection cooperation scheme where the "best" relay is selected to forward the message achieves good outage performance, but may cause poor fairness among relays. In this paper, we propose a practical scheme for the Decode-and-Forward (DF) protocol to solve the unfairness problem in the selection cooperation. Compared to previous work which obtained fairness but introduced performance loss, the proposed scheme aimed at improving fairness performance without outage performance deterioration. Numerical simulations show that the fairness among all relays is greatly improved by the proposed scheme without any loss of outage performance. It is also validated that the proposed scheme has lower complexities than other schemes and can be used in all signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, making it more practical for real networks.