Electrical & Computer Engineering, Department of

 

Date of this Version

2009

Citation

Hindawi Publishing Corporation, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Volume 2009, Article ID 458236, 16 pages

Comments

Copyright © 2009 J. Zhang and M. C. Gursoy. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License

Abstract

Achievable rates and resource allocation strategies for imperfectly known fading relay channels are studied. It is assumed that communication starts with the network training phase in which the receivers estimate the fading coefficients. Achievable rate expressions for amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward relaying schemes with different degrees of cooperation are obtained. We identify efficient strategies in three resource allocation problems: (1) power allocation between data and training symbols, (2) time/bandwidth allocation to the relay, and (3) power allocation between the source and relay in the presence of total power constraints. It is noted that unless the source-relay channel quality is high, cooperation is not beneficial and noncooperative direct transmission should be preferred at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values when amplify-and-forward or decode-and-forward with repetition coding is employed as the cooperation strategy. On the other hand, relaying is shown to generally improve the performance at low SNRs. Additionally, transmission schemes in which the relay and source transmit in nonoverlapping intervals are seen to perform better in the low-SNR regime. Finally, it is noted that care should be exercised when operating at very low SNR levels, as energy efficiency significantly degrades below a certain SNR threshold value.

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