Outage reduction in cooperative networks with limited feedback

In this paper, we propose a limited feedback scheme to improve outage performance for a wireless cooperative decode-and-forward network. Specifically, based on the instantaneous conditions of the source-destination and relay-destination channels, the destination will allocate the transmission time of the source and relay and feed back the allocation result to the source. Both limited and full (or infinite) rate feedback are considered. Under the practical assumption that only imperfect channel estimation is available at the receiver, we analyze the outage performance by deriving upper bounds on the outage probabilities. It will be demonstrated that, even with only one-bit feedback, the proposed feedback scheme can outperform the no feedback case. Furthermore, the outage performance can approach the optimality by exploiting limited (only a small number of bits) uniformly quantized feedback from the destination.