Relay selection in multi-node cooperative communications: When to cooperate and whom to cooperate with?

In this paper, we propose a new cooperative communication protocol, which achieves high bandwidth efficiency while guaranteeing full diversity order. The proposed scheme considers relay selection via the available partial channel state information (CSI) at the source and the relays. More precisely, the source determines when it needs to cooperate with one relay only among arbitrary N relays and which relay to cooperate with in case of cooperation, i.e., "When to cooperate?" and "Whom to cooperate with?". In case of cooperation, the source employs the optimal relay, which has the maximum instantaneous scaled harmonic mean function of its source-relay and relay-destination channels' gains. For the symmetric scenario, we prove that full diversity is guaranteed and that a significant increase of the bandwidth efficiency is achieved. Furthermore, we show the tradeoff between the achievable bandwidth efficiency and the corresponding error rate. Finally, the obtained analytical results are verified through computer simulations.