Relay selection algorithm for wireless cooperative network

Spatial diversity is one of the most efficient techniques used to overcome fading in wireless systems which can be accomplished by cooperative communication. Cooperative communication describes strategies to transfer data from the source to the destination by employing relay nodes between them. In this paper a relay selection algorithm is proposed where one relay is chosen based on instantaneous signal to noise ratio (ISNR) either between the source and relay or the relay and the destination. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated for perfect and estimated channel and for both decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify and forward (AF) protocols. The performance of the algorithm is compared with other existing methods for relay selection. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance than some of the previous algorithms.