  Cooperative diversity has been recently proposed as a way to form virtual
antenna arrays that provide dramatic gains in slow fading wireless
environments. However most of the proposed solutions require distributed
space-time coding algorithms, the careful design of which is left for future
investigation if there is more than one cooperative relay. We propose a novel
scheme, that alleviates these problems and provides diversity gains on the
order of the number of relays in the network. Our scheme first selects the best
relay from a set of M available relays and then uses this best relay for
cooperation between the source and the destination. We develop and analyze a
distributed method to select the best relay that requires no topology
information and is based on local measurements of the instantaneous channel
conditions. This method also requires no explicit communication among the
relays. The success (or failure) to select the best available path depends on
the statistics of the wireless channel, and a methodology to evaluate
performance for any kind of wireless channel statistics, is provided.
Information theoretic analysis of outage probability shows that our scheme
achieves the same diversity-multiplexing tradeoff as achieved by more complex
protocols, where coordination and distributed space-time coding for M nodes is
required, such as those proposed in [7]. The simplicity of the technique,
allows for immediate implementation in existing radio hardware and its adoption
could provide for improved flexibility, reliability and efficiency in future 4G
wireless systems.
