A Survey on Single Relay Selection for Co-operative Communication in Free Space Optical Communication

Multipath fading is one of the major obstacles for next generation wireless networks which limit the bandwidth requirement of services. There are many techniques found in literature to overcome the issues of multipath fading. However, co-operative communication is the major technique that has gained importance due to its ability to reduce fading. Co-operative communication is based on the relay selection technique using the channel state information at the source and relays. The main of relay based scheme is to achieve higher bandwidth efficiency. However, if the direct link between source to destination is proper and of high quality than there is no requirement to have relay based selection technique. The work in this thesis proposes a methodology to select optimal number of relays in order to achieve better transmission efficiency. Optical wireless communication (OWC) refers to transmission in unguided propagation media through the use of optical carriers, i.e., visible, infrared (IR), and ultraviolet (UV) bands.