Power Allocation Strategies for Fixed-Gain Half-Duplex Amplify-and-Forward Relaying in Nakagami-m Fading

Abstract: In this paper, we study power allocation strategies for a fixed-gain amplify-and-forward relay network employing multiple relays. We consider two optimization problems for the relay network: 1) optimal power allocation to maximize the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and 2) minimizing the total consumed power while maintaining the end-to-end SNR over a threshold value. We investigate these two problems for two relaying protocols of all-participate relaying and selective relaying and multiple cases of available channel state information (CSI) at the relays. We show that the SNR maximization problem is concave and the power minimization problem is convex for all protocols and CSI cases considered. We obtain closed-form expressions for the two problems in the case for full CSI and CSI of all the relay-destination links at the relays and solve the problems through convex programming when full CSI or CSI of the relay-destination links are not available at the relays. Numerical results show the benefit of having full CSI at the relays for both optimization problems. However, they also show that CSI overhead can be reduced by having only partial CSI at the relays with only a small degradation in performance.