An Energy-Efficient Distributed Relay Selection and Power Allocation Optimization Scheme over Wireless Cooperative Networks

We investigate a distributed joint relay selection and power allocation scheme in wireless multi-hop cooperative networks, taking both instantaneous channel state information (CSI) and relay nodes' residual energy into consideration. More specific, we formulate the cooperative relaying network as a restless bandit system, which has been successfully applied in stochastic control and operations research problems. The first-order finite-state Markov chain is used to characterize the time-varying channel and residual energy state transitions. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can efficiently enhance the expected system reward, while guaranteeing a good tradeoff between achievable date rate and average network lifetime.