Novel Rateless Coded Selection Cooperation in Dual-Hop Relaying Systems

Selection cooperation is proposed for rateless coded relaying by developing a novel low-complexity protocol that exploits all source-destination, source-relay, and relay-destination link qualities for relay selection. The source or any decoding relay having a link to the destination with a gain greater than a preset threshold is a candidate for collaboration. When the number of candidates reaches a preset value, the best of them is selected for passing the source data to the destination. The source and relays are informed of the selected node by a broadcast feedback from the destination. Limited feedback is required only between the destination and the other nodes and merely for declaring success in decoding or selecting the next transmitting node.