Abstract: This paper proposed a relay node iterative scheduling algorithm based on the channel capacity maximization for dualhop wireless networks. Based on the amplifyandforward relay protocol, the proposed algorithm selects relay nodes iteratively according to the criterion which makes the instantaneous capacity maximal when the destination node performs the joint decoding. The selection process continues until the number of the selected relays is equal to the number of source transmitting antennas or the channel capacity does not increase anymore. The simulation results show that under different conditions including total number of relay nodes, number of source transmitting antennas and signal to noise ratios of the forward and backward channels, the algorithm can obtain greater capacity gains and multirelay diversity gains over conventional algorithms and can reach the upper bound of the informationtheoretic capacity more closely.

Key words: relay selection, dualhop network, amplifyandforward, ergodic capacity