A Novel Relay Recruitment Algorithm for Cooperative Spatial Multiplexing in Clustered Systems

Cooperative spatial multiplexing (CSM) can increase the system spectral efficiency via collaboration among multiple distributed nodes. How the relays for cooperation are chosen is an important issue as it may affect the system performance. In this paper, we propose a new relay selection method for CSM in a clustered environment where the source and relays are close in proximity. Instead of directly optimizing the channel capacity, our algorithm considers the suitability of spatial multiplexing based on the condition number of the effective channel. The simulation results have shown that our method can achieve better error performance than some other relay selection schemes.