Energy efficient wireless communications have recently received much attention, due to the ever-increasing energy consumption of wireless communication systems. In this paper, we propose a new energy-efficient cooperative relaying scheme that selects a subset of relays before data transmission, through proactive participation of available relays using their local timers. We perform theoretical analysis of energy efficiency under maximum transmission power constraint, using practical data packet length, and taking account of the overhead for obtaining channel state information, relay selection, and cooperative beamforming. We provide the expression of average energy efficiency for the proposed scheme, and identify the optimal number and location of relays that maximise energy efficiency of the system. A closedform approximate expression for the optimal position of relays is derived. We also perform overhead analysis for the proposed scheme and study the impact of data packet lengths on energy efficiency. The analytical and simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme exhibits significantly higher energy efficiency as compared to direct transmission, best relay selection, all relay selection, and a state-of-the-art existing cooperative relaying scheme. Moreover, the proposed scheme reduces the signalling overhead and achieves higher energy savings for larger data packets.
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