Decode-and-Forward Relaying With Quantized Channel State Feedback: An Outage Exponent Analysis

The problem of resource allocation to maximize the outage exponent over a fading relay channel using the decode-and-forward protocol with quantized channel state feedback (CSF) is studied. Three different scenarios are considered: relay-to-source, destination-to-relay, and destination-to-source-and-relay CSF. In the relay-to-source CSF scenario, it is found that using merely one bit of CSF to control the source transmit power is sufficient to achieve the multiantenna upper bound in a range of multiplexing gains. In the destination-to-relay CSF scenario, the systems slightly outperform dynamic decode-and-forward (DDF) at high multiplexing gains, even with only one bit of feedback. Finally, in the destination-to-source-and-relay CSF scenario, if the source-relay channel gain is unknown to the feedback quantizer at the destination, the diversity gain only grows linearly in the number of feedback levels, in sharp contrast to an exponential growth for multiantenna channels. In this last scenario, a simple scheme is shown to perform close to the corresponding upper bound.