Outage Analysis and Power Allocation for Distributed Space-Time Coding-Based Cooperative Systems over Rayleigh Fading Channels

In this research, we study the outage probability for distributed space-time coding-based cooperative (DSTC) systems with amplify-and-forward relaying over Rayleigh fading channels with a high temporal correlation where the direct link between the source and the destination is available. In particular, we derive the upper and lower bounds of the outage probability as well as their corresponding asymptotic expressions. In addition, using only the average channel powers for the source-to-relay and relay-to-destination links, we propose an efficient power allocation scheme between the source and the relay to minimize the asymptotic upper bound of the outage probability. Through a numerical investigation, we verify the analytical expressions as well as the effectiveness of the proposed efficient power allocation. The numerical results show that the lower and upper bounds tightly correspond to the exact outage probability, and the proposed efficient power allocation scheme provides an outage probability similar to that of the optimal power allocation scheme that minimizes the exact outage probability.