Abstract— Depending on the position of mobile stations in the multihop relay system, various types of cooperative relaying schemes show the different level of throughput and outage performance, due to their inherent trade-off between diversity gain and overhead associated with individual cooperation scheme. In order to improve both throughput and outage performance at the same time, we propose a unified selection criterion to deal with the different level of combining gain and overhead associated with each scheme, which allows for employing the different cooperative relaying scheme in the varying position of mobile station. Our system-level simulation results for IEEE 802.16j multi-hop relay confirm the varying level of trade-off among the different cooperative relaying schemes and demonstrate the possible performance that can be achieved by using the various types of cooperative relaying schemes in the multi-hop relay system.