Wireless Cooperative Relaying Based on Opportunistic Relay Selection

Advances in wireless technologies, including more powerful devices and low cost radio technologies, have potential to drive an ubiquitous utilization of Internet services. Nevertheless wireless technologies face performance limitations due to unstable wireless conditions and mobility of devices. In face of multi-path propagation and low data rate stations, cooperative relaying promises gains in performance and reliability. However, cooperation procedures are unstable (rely on current channel conditions) and introduce overhead that can endanger performance especially when nodes are mobile. In this article we describe a framework, called RelaySpot [1], to implement cooperative wireless solutions in large mobile networks, based upon opportunistic relay selection methods. RelaySpot based solutions are expected to minimize signaling exchange, remove estimation of channel conditions, and improve the utilization of spatial diversity, minimizing outage and increasing reliability.