An Efficient Adaptive Distributed Space-Time Coding Scheme for Cooperative Relaying

A non-regenerative dual-hop wireless system based on a distributed space-time coding strategy is considered. It is assumed that each relay retransmits an appropriately scaled space-time coded version of its received signal. The main goal of this paper is to investigate a power allocation strategy in relay stations, which is based on minimizing the outage probability. In the high signal-to-noise ratio regime for the relay-destination link, it is shown that a threshold-based power allocation scheme (i.e., the relay remains silent if its channel gain with the source is less than a prespecified threshold) is optimum. Monte-Carlo simulations show that the derived on-off power allocation scheme performs close to optimum for finite signal-to-noise ratio values. Numerical results demonstrate a dramatic improvement in system performance as compared to the case that the relay stations forward their received signals with full power. In addition, a hybrid amplify-and-forward/detect-and-forward scheme is proposed for the case that the quality of the source-relay link is good. Finally, the robustness of the proposed scheme in the presence of channel estimation errors is numerically evaluated.