Robust Power Allocation for Multi-Carrier Amplify-and-Forward Relaying Systems

It has been shown that adaptive power allocation can provide a substantial performance gain in wireless communication systems when perfect channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter. However when only imperfect CSI is available, the performance may degrade significantly, and as such robust power allocation schemes have been developed to minimize the effects of this degradation. In this paper, we investigate power allocation strategies for multicarrier systems, in which each subcarrier employs single amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying scheme. Optimal power allocation schemes are proposed by maximizing the approximated channel capacity under aggregate power constraint (APC) and separate power constraint (SPC). By comparison with the uniform power allocation scheme and the best channel power allocation scheme, we confirm that both the APC and SPC schemes achieve a performance gain over benchmark schemes. In addition, the impact of channel uncertainty is also considered in this paper by modeling the uncertainty regions as bounded sets, and results show that the uncertainty can degrade the worst-case performance significantly.