Cooperative Communication Protocol Designs Based on Optimum Power and Time Allocation

Cooperative communication has emerged as a new wireless network communication concept, in which parameter optimization such as power budget and time allocation plays an important role in cooperative relaying protocol designs. While most existing works on cooperative relaying protocol designs considered equal-time allocation scenario, i.e., equal time duration is assigned to each source and each relay, in this work we intend to design and optimize cooperative communication protocols by exploring all possible variations in time and power domains. We consider a cooperative relaying network in which no channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter side and the protocol optimization is based on channel statistics (i.e., mean and variance) and it does not depend on instantaneous channel information. First, we consider an ideal cooperative relaying protocol where the system can use arbitrary re-encoding methods at the relay and adjust time allocation arbitrarily. We obtain an optimum strategy of power and time allocations to minimize the outage probability of the ideal cooperative protocol. Specifically, for any given time allocation, we are able to determine the corresponding optimum power allocation analytically with a closed-form expression. We also show that to minimize the outage probability of the protocol, one should always allocate more energy and time to the source than the relay. Second, with more realistic consideration, we design a practical cooperative relaying protocol based on linear mapping, i.e., using linear mapping as the re-encoding method at the relay and considering integer time slots in the two phases. The theoretical results from the ideal cooperative protocol serve as a guideline and benchmark in the practical cooperative protocol design. We also develop an optimum linear mapping to minimize the outage probability of the linear-mapping based cooperative protocol. Extensive numerical and simulation studies illustrate our theoretical developments and show that the performance of the proposed cooperative relaying protocol based on the optimum linear mapping is close to the performance benchmark of the ideal cooperative protocol.