Power allocation of cooperative amplify-and-forward communications with multiple relays

Cooperative diversity is one of the most effective ways to mitigate the fading effect of wireless channels and obtain the spatial gain in wireless networks. In this paper, an optimal power allocation (OPA) scheme for a cooperative communication system using the amplify-and-forward (AF) transmit strategy with multiple relay users is proposed by minimizing the bit-error-rate (BER) at the destination under the constraint of the total transmit power of both the source user and the relay users. Simulation results indicate that the proposed power allocation method can achieve significant BER performance improvement than using the equal power allocation (EPA) scheme, while still attains low complexity. The system performance is improved significantly with the increasing of the number of relay users at high signal-noise ratio (SNR). However, at low SNR, the system performance decreases when the relay number increases. Thus, an adaptive relay selection scheme may be used to choose the appropriate relay numbers in different transmission scenarios to provide system performance improvement and keep the power allocation scheme with low complexity.