Joint power allocation and relay positioning in multi-relay cooperative systems

The authors consider a dual-hop multi-relay cooperative relay system in this study. Both decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) protocols are considered. Under different relay selection strategies, the authors derive closed-form outage probability expressions. With the second-order channel statistics, the authors propose to jointly optimise power allocation (PA) and relay positions in order to minimise the system outage probability. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptive allocation algorithms significantly outperform fixed allocation algorithms. With the proposed joint optimisation algorithm, AF relaying outperforms DF relaying when multiple relays are selected to help. When only the best relay is selected to help, DF relaying is shown to have better performance.