5820 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 65, NO. 7, JULY 2016
Maximizing Achievable Rate Strategies for
Incremental-Relay Multicarrier Transmission
Yang Zhang, Lihua Pang, Fengkui Gong, Guangliang Ren,
Xiao Liang, Bin Li, Jianwu Dou, and Jiandong Li
Abstract—This paper develops an improved amplify-and-forward (AF)
orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme, where an
incremental policy is fully utilized to promote the spectrum efficiency of co-
operative transmission, and presents several achievable-rate-maximizing
resource allocation strategies. The high computational complexity for op-
timization necessitates our investigation of suboptimal approaches. How-
ever, the associated computational burdens are still intensive due to the
exhaustive search nature. As a consequence, a low-complexity alternative
evolves to achieve a better tradeoff between performance and complexity.
Moreover, its average unconditional signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) outage
probability is analytically derived. Numerical results are shown to illus-
trate the benefits of the proposals and verify the validity of the theoretical
analysis.
Index Terms—Achievable rate, amplify-and-forward (AF), cooperative
communication, incremental-relaying, orthogonal frequency division mul-
tiplexing (OFDM), outage probability, resource allocation.
I. INTRODUCTION
The essential idea of cooperative transmission is that spatial diver-
sity is obtained through antenna sharing by wireless network users. As
a basic collaborative scheme, amplify-and-forward (AF) has attracted
extensive attention since detection and decoding are not required on
the relays.
Capacity optimization is the most fundamental problem faced by
user cooperation. It is well known that due to the half-duplex nature of
the relay nodes, channel capacity of the cooperative systems will drop
to one half in contrast to direct transmission. Thus, it is imperative
Manuscript received June 13, 2014; revised April 18, 2015; accepted July 2,
2015. Date of publication July 7, 2015; date of current version July 14, 2016.
This work was supported in part by the Natural Science Basic Research Plan
in Shaanxi Province under Grant 2015JQ6221 and Grant 2015JQ6259; by
the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant
JB140109; by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant
61401321, Grant 61372067, and Grant 61510505; by the National High Tech
R&D Program of China under Grant 2014AA01A704; by the National Basic
Research Program of China under Grant 2014CB340206; by the Open Project of
the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks under Grant ISN16-01;
and by the Science and Technology Research and Development Program of
Shaanxi Province under Grant 2014KJXX-49. The review of this paper was
coordinated by Prof. S. Muhaidat.
Y. Zhang is with the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks,
Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China, with the School of Information Engi-
neering, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710054, China, and
also with the National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast
University, Nanjing 210096, China (e-mail: yangzhang1984@gmail.com).
L. Pang is with the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks,
Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China, and also with the School of Informa-
tion Engineering, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710054,
China.
F. Gong, G. Ren, and J. Li are with the State Key Laboratory of Integrated
Service Networks, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China.
X. Liang is with the National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory,
Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China.
B. Li and J. Dou are with the System Simulation Department, ZTE Corpora-
tion, Shanghai 201203, China.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVT.2015.2453213
to promote the capacity of cooperative transmission. In particular,
some protocols committed to improve spectrum efficiency have been
proposed, such as incremental relaying and two-way and two-path re-
laying. Incremental relaying enhances spectrum efficiency by invoking
relays to help only when necessary, i.e., when the direct transmission
from the source to the destination fails. In two-way and two-path
relaying, capacity is upgraded through reducing the number of slots
used in the exchange of information data and through employing
different relays in adjacent time slots, respectively. However, most
of these spectrum-efficient strategies in the literature focus on flat-
fading relay channels. Alternatively, power assignment between the
source and the relay nodes has attracted a considerable amount of
attention in recent years since transmission power, on one hand, can
be deemed as a scarce radio resource particularly in some battery-
operated cooperative relaying applications and, on the other hand, has
to be kept at a reasonable level to comply with the criterion of future
green communications. It has been proved that by optimally assigning
limited power to the nodes involved in cooperative transmission, sys-
tem performance such as power consumption with quality-of-service
(QoS) constraints, capacity, bit error rate, or outage probability can be
significantly boosted [1]. Meanwhile, it has been recently shown that
the maximum benefit of cooperative relaying would be achieved with
minimum overhead if a single best relay can be chosen for a particular
node pair. Specifically, Krikidis et al. in [2] proposed a classical max-
min relay selection mechanism for AF networks, in which a bottleneck
was defined as the smaller signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the dual-
hop links, and the relay with a maximum bottleneck was selected to
help. Afterward, this scheme received extensive investigation. Four
single-relay selection mechanisms, including the max-min scheme,
were put forward based on the instantaneous or average SNR received
for broadcast networks in [3]. It is worth mentioning that the potential
relay nodes and the transmitting power can be regarded as resources
and be jointly optimized with distinct optimization objectives [4].
Building on the given observations, we investigate broadband or-
thogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) communications
with incremental AF relaying and optimize the available resources
with a total sum-power constraint in the considered scenario to obtain
higher spectrum efficiency. The result in this work is an attempt
to review resource allocation problems in a brand new application
scenario and can probably make the research around the topic of
relay more comprehensive. Our specific contributions are threefold:
1) A new cooperative protocol for incremental-relay multicarrier AF
cooperative transmission is proposed to improve the network achiev-
able rate. Specifically, this protocol is made of two signaling periods,
and it absorbs the advantages of the incremental relaying strategy in
which subcarriers with a high-quality direct link are fully utilized.
2) Given that an optimal solution for the resource allocation is difficult
to obtain even with numerical techniques, we thus propose subop-
timal step-by-step strategies including incremental policy decision,
power loading, and relay selection algorithms to further enhance the
spectrum efficiency. Specifically, binary incremental policies can be
first determined by instantaneous channel state information (CSI), and
subsequent power allocation results can be mathematically obtained
by standard Lagrange techniques. Ultimately, relay selection would
be conducted in either a global or an independent way based on
the algorithm flexibility. 3) Although satisfactory performance can be
achieved, the proposals are still not easy to implement. Therefore, we
further simplify the algorithm and derive the corresponding average
unconditional SNR outage probability at the subcarrier level. Simu-
lation results indicate that a good tradeoff can be realized between
performance and complexity.
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