Tight bounds on the ergodic capacity of cooperative analog relaying with adaptive source transmission techniques

Tight bounds for the Shannon capacity of amplify-and-forward cooperative diversity networks are derived for three different adaptive source transmission policies in a myriad of fading environments: (i) constant power with optimal rate adaptation (ORA); (ii) optimal joint power and rate adaptation (OPRA); and (iii) fixed rate with truncated channel inversion (TCIFR). Our unified framework based on the moment-generating function (MGF) approach allows us to gain insights as to how fade distributions and dissimilar fading statistics across the distinct communication links will affect the Shannon capacity, without imposing any restrictions on the fading parameters.