Power allocation for cooperative communications

Abstract

In this chapter, we review the optimal power allocation policies for fading channels in single user and multiple access scenarios. We provide some background on cooperative communications, starting with the relay channel, and moving onto mutually cooperative systems. Then, we consider power control and user cooperation jointly, and for a fading Gaussian multiple access channel (MAC) with user cooperation, we present a channel adaptive encoding policy, which relies on block Markov superposition coding. We obtain the power allocation policies that maximize the average rates achievable by block Markov coding, subject to average power constraints. The optimal policies result in a coding scheme that is simpler than the one for a general multiple access channel with generalized feedback. This simpler coding scheme also leads to the possibility of formulating an otherwise non-concave optimization problem as a concave one. Using the perfect channel state information (CSI) available at the transmitters to adapt the powers, we demonstrate significant gains over the achievable rates for existing cooperative systems. We consider both backwards and window decoding, and show that, window decoding, which incurs less decoding delay, achieves the same sum rate as backwards decoding, when the powers are optimized.