Statistical channel knowledge-based optimum power allocation for relaying protocols in the high SNR regime

We are concerned with transmit power optimization in a wireless relay network with various cooperation protocols. With statistical channel knowledge (in the form of knowledge of the fading distribution and the path loss information across all the nodes) at the transmitters and perfect channel state information at the receivers, we derive the optimal power allocation that minimizes high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) approximations of the outage probability of the mutual information (MI) with amplify-and-forward (AF), decode-and-forward (DF) and distributed space-time coded (DSTC) relaying protocols operating over Rayleigh fading channels. We demonstrate that the high SNR approximation-based outage probability expressions are convex functions of the transmit power vector, and the nature of the optimal power allocation depends on whether or not a direct link between the source and the destination exists. Interestingly, for AF and DF protocols, this allocation depends only on the ratio of mean channel power gains (i.e., the ratio of the source-relay gain to the relay-destination gain), whereas with a DSTC protocol this allocation also depends on the transmission rate when a direct link exists. In addition to the immediate benefits of improved outage behavior, our results show that optimal power allocation brings impressive coding gains over equal power allocation. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the coding gain gap between the AF and DF protocols can also be reduced by the optimal power allocation.