Selecting a spatially efficient cooperative relay

Cooperative relaying is a communication technique in wireless networks where neighboring nodes assist communication pairs to mitigate the negative effects of multi-path fading. The resulting performance strongly depends on the selected relays. Although a cooperative relay provides benefits to a given source-destination pair, overall network performance might be degraded due to the increased level of interference. So far almost all relay selection mechanisms consider mainly channel conditions to the potential relays. In this paper we propose a contention-based relay selection mechanism that can take into account also spatial efficiency of potential relays. For that the degree as well as relative position of the nodes are used for selection. With the proposed method a high successful relay selection probability can be achieved, while significantly reducing the amount of additional spatial resources blocked by the cooperative relay.