Cooperative BICM-OFDM: Sub-carrier and power allocation

In this paper, we consider amplify-and-forward cooperative diversity for wireless systems employing bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In the second hop, multiple relays transmit concurrently over disjoint sets of sub-carriers. We propose uniform and non-uniform sub-carrier allocation schemes, which guarantee full diversity if all involved channels have identical lengths. The non-uniform allocation scheme also guarantees full diversity if the involved channels have different lengths. In addition, we formulate a power allocation problem for minimization of an upper bound on the worst-case pairwise error probability of the considered cooperative diversity scheme and provide an efficient solution using geometric programming. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed sub- carrier and power allocation schemes.