Power allocations in minimum-energy SER-constrained cooperative networks

In this paper, we propose minimum power allocation strategies for repetition-based amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying, given a required symbol error rate (SER) at the destination. We consider the scenario where one source and multiple relays cooperate to transmit messages to the destination. We derive the optimal power allocation strategy for two-hop AF cooperative network that minimizes the total relay power subject to the SER requirement at the destination. Two outstanding features of the proposed schemes are that the power coefficients have a simple solution and are independent of knowledge of instantaneous channel state information (CSI). We further extend the SER constraint minimum power allocation to the case of multibranch, multihop network and derive the closed-form solution for the power control coefficients. For the case of power-limited relays, we propose two iterative algorithms to find the power coefficients for the SER constraint minimum-energy cooperative networks. However, this power minimization strategy does not necessarily maximize the lifetime of battery-limited systems. Thus, we propose two other AF cooperative schemes which consider the residual battery energy, as well as the statistical CSI, for the purpose of lifetime maximization. Simulations show that the proposed minimum power allocation strategies could considerably save the total transmitted power compared to the equal transmit power scheme.