A light-weight relay selection mechanism selects the most likely “best” relay station for data transmission from a given source station S to an access point AP using the Initial Receive Signal Strength (IRSS) to infer the future data transmission rate. In the initialization stage, the access point AP constructs a table mapping the IRSSs of receivers to eight levels of transmission rate. In the relay selection stage, relay candidates R measure the IRSSs for the source station S and access point AP and report their IRSS levels to the AP. A contention-based mechanism is dedicated to enabling the candidate with higher IRSS levels to report earlier. With this mechanism, the access point AP is able to select the station with the highest estimated data transmission rate.