Shared relay assignment (SRA) for many-to-one traffic in cooperative wireless transmissions

Relay assignment significantly affects the performance of cooperative communications. Previous studies in this area have mostly focused on assigning a dedicated relay to each source-destination pair for one-to-one (121) traffic. On the other hand, many-to-one (M21) traffic, which is also common in many situations (for example, several users associate with one access point in a wireless access network such as a WLAN), hasn't been well studied. This paper addresses the shared relay assignment (SRA) problem for M21 traffic. We formulate two new optimization problems: one is to maximize the minimum throughput among all the sources (hereafter called M21-SRA-MMT), and the other is to maximize the total throughput over all the sources while maintaining some degree of fairness (hereafter called M21-SRA-MTT). As both of these problems are NP-hard, we propose two approximation algorithms whose performance factors are 5.828 and 3, respectively, based on the rounding mechanism. Extensive simulation results show that our algorithm for M21-SRA-MMT can significantly improve the minimum throughput compared with existing algorithms, while our algorithm for M21-SRA-MTT can achieve the close-to-optimal performance.