Adaptive transmission policy over Rayleigh fading channels for cooperative networks with limited feedback

The authors propose an adaptive transmission scheme for cooperative communication networks. The cooperative network with the proposed scheme chooses the transmission rate and decides to involve the relay in transmission, adapting to the channel state estimated from limited feedback information (e.g. positive/negative acknowledgement (ACK/NACK) feedback). Considering that the limited feedback information provides only partial knowledge about the actual channel states, the authors design a decision-making algorithm on cooperative transmission by using a partially observable Markov decision process framework. The simulation results show that, when the feedback overhead is taken into account, the proposed scheme outperforms even the scheme with which the states of all relevant channels are estimated and fed back.