Energy-Efficient Relay Selection of Cooperative HARQ Based on the Number of Transmissions over Rayleigh Fading Channels

Cooperative hybrid automatic retransmission request (C-HARQ) is a simple and effective method for wireless communication. Since its performance largely depends on the selection of a relevant relay, the design of an appropriate relay selection scheme is very important. Although various works have been performed on this topic, most of them did not take into account both the 'not memoryless' and multiple retransmission characteristics of C-HARQ, resulting in the loss of achievable performance. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative relay selection scheme in a distributed manner called transmission number relaying (TNR) to simultaneously reduce the outage probability and increase the energy efficiency by utilizing the features of C-HARQ. The TNR scheme determines a single relay based on the estimated number of transmissions, which is calculated from the channel condition. Using these numbers instead of just the channel condition improves the outage probability and reduces the total consumed energy. The exact probability of the number of transmissions at each relay and the outage probability are analyzed, and the numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the outage probability and reduces the total consumed energy. In addition, when the number of available relays is small, the proposed scheme achieves high energy efficiency.