Impact of Channel Estimation Error on Bidirectional MABC-AF Relaying With Asymmetric Traffic Requirements

Channel estimation error results in severe performance deterioration in wireless networks. In this paper, we study the impact of imperfect channel estimation (ICE) on the outage performance of bidirectional relaying where the two sources have asymmetric traffic requirements (ATRs). In particular, we focus on the amplify-and-forward (AF) relay-assisted multiple-access broadcast (MABC) protocol, i.e., MABC-AF, which has received much attention due to its high spectrum efficiency and low complexity. In the single-relay scenario, we derive exact and generalized closed-form expressions for system outage probability, which indicate that the system outage is determined by the unidirectional outage in the case of highly asymmetric traffic patterns. For more insights into our approach, the closed-form asymptotic expressions are also evaluated, manifesting the interesting error floor (EF) phenomenon due to ICE. Using these analytical results, we further develop a robust and practical optimum power-allocation (OPA) algorithm that minimizes the system outage probability under aggregate and individual node power constraints. In the multirelay scenario, by taking into account the traffic knowledge, a novel relay selection criterion is proposed for asymmetric MABC-AF, followed by its impact on the system outage probability in the presence of ICE. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our analytical results and highlight the effect of the proposed OPA algorithm under various traffic requirements and channel estimation errors. Furthermore, the results also show that the proposed relay selection criterion is superior to the classical max-min criterion with ATRs, and the performance improvement becomes remarkable as channel estimation error increases.