On the Power Allocation for Cooperative Amplify-and-Forward Transmission

In this paper, efficient power allocation strategy for user cooperative transmission using amplify-and-forward (AF) approach is investigated. Power allocation is solved by finding the desirable ratio of power used for cooperative- information transmission to total power in an attempt to minimize bit error rate (BER) with a constraint of fixed total transmit power for each user. User fairness is also considered in the analysis. Simulation results show that with appropriate power allocation, BER performance of cooperative schemes can achieve a significant gain over non-cooperative systems.