On the benefits of location-based relay selection in mobile wireless networks

We consider infrastructure-based mobile networks that are assisted by a single relay transmission where both the downstream destination and relay nodes are mobile. Selecting the optimal transmission path for a destination node requires up-to-date link quality estimates of all relevant links. If the relay selection is based on link quality measurements, the number of links to update grows quadratically with the number of nodes, and measurements need to be updated frequently when nodes are mobile. In this paper, we consider a location-based relay selection scheme where link qualities are estimated from node positions; in the scenario of a node-based location system such as GPS, the location-based approach reduces signaling overhead, which in this case only grows linearly with the number of nodes. This paper studies these two relay selection approaches and investigates how they are affected with varying information update interval, node mobility, location inaccuracy, and inaccurate propagation model parameters. Our results show that location-based relay selection performs better than SNR-based relay selection at typical levels of location error when medium-scale fading can be neglected or accurately predicted.