Power allocation for OFDM-based cooperative relay systems

Cooperative relays can provide spatial diversity and improve performance of wireless communications. In this paper, we study subcarrier power allocation at the relays for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based wireless systems. For cooperative relay with amplify-and-forward(AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) algorithms, we investigate the impact of power allocation to the mutual information between the source and destination. From our simulation results on word-error-rate (WER) performance, we find that the DF algorithm with power allocation provides better performance than that of AF algorithm in a single path relay network because the former is able to eliminate channel noise at each relay. For the multiple path relay network, however, the network structure is already resistant to noise and channel distortion, and AF approach is a more attractive choice due to its lower complexity.