Power allocation in a transmit diversity system with mean channel gain information

We study the power allocation problem in a transmit diversity wireless system with mean channel gain information. In Rayleigh fading for a given set of mean channel gains and nodes, we seek to find the power allocation that minimizes the outage probability subject to a total power constraint. The optimal solution is shown to be computationally intensive when the number of channels is large. Instead, we derive a simple solution based on the upper bound to the outage probability which can be summarized as equal power allocation with channel selection. Numerical results show that the proposed solution is near-optimal over a wide range of parameter values. The problem addressed and the solution are relevant to a decode-and-forward cooperative relaying system with only partial channel information available to the relays.