This article is part of the series Distributed Space-Time Systems.

Open Access Research Article

Power-Efficient Relay Selection in Cooperative Networks Using Decentralized Distributed Space-Time Block Coding

Lu Zhang* and Leonard J Cimini

Author Affiliations

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA

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EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2008, 2008:362809  doi:10.1155/2008/362809


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2008/1/362809


Received: 1 May 2007
Accepted: 8 September 2007
Published: 18 October 2007

© 2008 The Author(s).

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Distributed space-time block coding (Dis-STBC) achieves diversity through cooperative transmission among geographically dispersed nodes. In this paper, we present a power-efficient relay-selection strategy for decentralized Dis-STBC in a selective decode-and-forward cooperative network. In particular, for a two-stage network, each decoded node broadcasts a small amount of information with limited power. This node then utilizes its own and its neighbors' information to decide whether or not to act as a relay for the source information. In this way, only part of the decoded set will act as relays. Further, by applying the idea of this relay-selection strategy to each relaying hop in a multihop network, a power-efficient hop-by-hop routing strategy is formulated. The outage analyses and simulations are presented to illustrate the advantage of these strategies.

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