Amplify-and-Forward Cooperative Diversity Schemes for Multi-Carrier Systems

We propose generic relay and subcarrier allocation schemes for multicarrier (MC) system with amplify-and-forward (AF) relays. The outage probability bounds are derived analytically for each scheme. Simulation results show that these bounds are very tight and better than the bounds obtained straightforwardly from the analysis in the Single-Carrier (SC) case. This is because in our analysis we reckon with the increased degree of freedom brought by the parallel channels. One of the proposed schemes, the Average Best Relay Selection scheme, is best suited for practical implementation since it approaches the best performance while minimizing the required amount of signaling.