Outage minimization with optimal power allocation based on cooperative relaying and partner selection

Cooperative communication has characteristics of spatial diversity and virtual antenna, thus it can improve communication efficiency significantly in cellular or wireless data networks. One of the essential design issues in cooperative communication is partner selection mechanism. The problem of selecting suitable partners for a cooperative strategy is more complex when prospective partners have links of dissimilar quality to a central destination, leading to the possibility of non-reciprocal cooperation. In this paper, we consider a coded cooperative system under Rayleigh fading and path loss. We present a novel algorithm for partner selection and optimal power allocation in the Decode-and-Forward (DF) cooperative diversity that minimizes the outage probability given required total transmission power constraint. We evaluate the proposed algorithm by conducting simulations. Simulation results show that the selection strategy can increase duration of cooperation, as well as decrease the probability of unsuccessful partner selection. The results demonstrate that the outcomes of the proposed algorithm are very close to results of full search for optimal set.