Abstract
In deterministic networks where relay nodes are stationary, combined relay selection is an efficient relay selection scheme, which is capable of achieving the near-optimal outage performance with much lower system complexity. However, the efficiency of combined relay selection is only validated upon fixed topological settings. To investigate the performance of combined relay selection in spatially random networks (SRNs), we employ the Poisson point process to model the dynamical nature of cooperative networks and study the outage performance of the proposed system. It is surprising that the equivalence principle of combined relay selection appearing in deterministic networks does not hold in SRNs.