Combined Relay Selection Enabled by Supervised Machine Learning

Combined relay selection only requires two relays to forward signals transmitted on multiple subcarriers, but the optimal outage performance is almost surely achievable in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region. However, because combined relay selection involves the generation of the full set of two-relay combinations, the selection complexity of combined relay selection is much higher than that of per-subcarrier relay selection when the number of relays goes large. This drawback restricts the implementation of combined relay selection in dense networks. To overcome this drawback, we propose to enable combined relay selection by supervised machine learning (ML). Because the training procedure is off-line, the proposed implementation scheme can considerably reduce the selection complexity and the processing latency. We carry out extensive experiments on TensorFlow 2.1 over a graphics processing unit (GPU) aided computing cloud server to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The experimental results confirm that supervised ML can provide near-optimal performance with lower computing latency that well matches that provided by brute-force search and the optimal relay selection in a per-subcarrier manner.