Abstract: An amplify-and-forward (AF) based multi-relay network is studied. In order to minimize the system outage probability with a required transmission rate, a joint power allocation (PA) and multi-relay selection scheme is proposed under both total and individual power constraints (TIPC). In the proposed scheme, the idea of ordering is adopted to avoid exhaustive search without losing much system performance. Besides the channel quantity, the ordering algorithm proposed in this article also takes relays’ maximal output ability into consideration, which is usually ignored in traditional relay ordering algorithms. In addition, simple power reallocation method is provided to avoid repetitive PA operation during the process of searching all possible relay subsets. By Adopting the idea of ordering and using the proposed power reallocation method lead to remarkable decrease of the computation complexity, making the scheme easier and more feasible to implement in practical communication scenarios. Simulations show that the proposed multi-relay selection scheme provides similar performance compared to the optimal scheme with optimal PA and exhaustive search (OPAES) but with much lower complexity

Key words: cooperative communication, multi-relay selection, power allocation, outage probability, amplify-and-forward