US Patent 7593342 Route selection in cooperative relay networks

A method selects a route in a wireless cooperative relay network of nodes, the nodes including a source, a set of relays, and a destination. A codeword is encoded as a data stream. The data stream is transmitted from a source to a destination via a set of relays. Mutual information is accumulated at a particular node to decode the data stream and recover the codeword. Then, a route from the source to the destination is selected based on channel state information between the nodes while transmitting and accumulating.