Power allocation and relay selection for AF two-path successive relaying networks

Two-path or successive relaying, which aims to establish two relay links transmitting different information symbols in adjacent time slots, has recently emerged as an attractive wireless communication protocol to improve the spectral efficiency in half-duplex cooperative systems. In this paper, we investigate power allocation and relay selection techniques for amplify-and-forward two-path successive relaying networks. Our approach is based on the maximization of the received SNR subject to a total power budget consumed by the source and the relay assisting this specific transmission. Two scenarios including with and without direct link are considered here. We show that the main problem has a closed-form solution and only requires a few amounts of feedback bits to be broadcasted. Numerical results reveal that the proposed approaches are more insensitive to the inter-relay interference and robust to channel estimation errors; meanwhile, they perform better than the existing schemes. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.