Joint Optimization of Opportunistic Relaying and

Power Allocation in Cooperative OFDM Networks

Funian Li
*
,Guangxi Zhu
*
,Desheng Wang
*

*
Dept. of Electronics and Engineering Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Wuhan National Laboratory of Optoelectronics, Wuhan, China

Dept. of Electronics and Engineering Information, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
lifunian@gmail.com


AbstractCooperative OFDM transmission is an efficient
solution to combat wireless channel fading and to increase system
throughput in future board communication. In this paper, we
consider the uplink scenario of a cellular cooperative OFDM
network, in which multi-relays can forward the sources message
to base station. The uplink throughput is optimized by using
decode-and-forward (DF) opportunistic relaying. We show that
the problem is formulated as a mixed binary integer
programming problem, which is hard to find the global optimum
in terms of computational complexity. Thus we decomposed the
optimization problem into two sub-problems of opportunistic
relaying strategy and power allocation. First, the opportunistic
relaying strategy is given by making use of the equivalent
channel power gain. Second, a low-complexity power allocation
algorithm is proposed. The simulation result shows that the
proposed scheme can greatly improve the system throughput.
Keywords: cooperative communication; orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing;opporunistic relaying; power allocation
I. INTRODUCTION
Cooperative communication has received much attention
in the recent years among the wireless communications and ad
hoc network. Through sharing the antennas of multiple
distributed transmitters or receivers to create virtual antenna
arrays, relay transmissions have been shown to improve
bandwidth efficiency, save terminal power and enhance
system reliability, etc[1,2].In relay systems, two main
strategies are discussed as: decode-and-forward (DF) and
amplify-and-forward (AF). DF cooperation requires the relay
to decode received signal and then retransmit. In the AF
strategy, relay just amplifies and retransmits the received
signal without decoding the signal.
Additionally, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) is a key technique for wide-band wireless
communication, which can capture multi-path energy, mitigate
the inter-symbol interferences, and offer high spectral
efficiency. It is known that proper resource allocation in
cooperative OFDM networks can greatly improve the system
performance, which is comprehensively studied. E.g. the
power allocation (PA) problems for OFDM relay links was
investigated [3, 4]. Bit loading allocation algorithms under the
total throughput constraint were considered [5, 6]. Subcarrier-
mapping scheme in AF OFDM networks was proposed [7, 8].

Figure 1. multi- relays uplink cooperative system
Moreover, opportunistic relaying, in which only one best
relay is selected to forward the sources data, has gain many
research interest. Due to advantage of simplification of the
signaling and feedback overhead, opportunistic relaying is
proved to be a simple and efficient scheme to achieve full
cooperative diversity [9] and save energy [10]. In [11], it
shows that opportunistic relaying strategy can minimize the
outage probability of the multi-relays networks under an
aggregate power constraint .Thus, it is reasonable for the
optimally joint opportunistic relaying and resource allocation
to improve system performance in cooperative communication.
In this paper, the uplink scenario of a cellular cooperative
OFDM networks is considered, in which multi-relay can
forward the sources message to base station. The uplink
throughput is optimized by using DF opportunistic relaying.
We show that the joint optimization problem is very
complicated, which is difficult to find the global optimum in
terms of computational complexity. Thus we divided the joint
resource allocation problem into two sub-problems of
opportunistic relaying strategy and power allocation scheme.
And the simulation result shows that the proposed scheme can
greatly improve the system throughput.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II
introduces our system model and formulates the optimization
problem firstly. Section III provided opportunistic relaying
strategy. Subsequently, Section IV describes the sub-optimal
power allocation scheme, the simulation results and discussions
are given in Section V. Finally, the concluding remarks are
provided in Section VI.
II. SYSTEM MODEL AND PROBLEM FORMULATION
The uplink scenario of cooperative OFDM system is
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation of China under grant
60496315 and 60802009,by the National High Technology Development
Program of China under Grant No.2008AA01Z204 and No.2009AA01Z205, by
International Science and Technology Cooperation Programme of China under
Grant No.2008DFA11630, by Hubei Science Foundation under grant
No.2007ABA008
Proceedings of the 15th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC 2009)-078

978-1-4244-4785-5/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE

considered where one source tries to send the message through
R relays to one destination (base station), which is depicted in
Figure 1. Let {1, 2,.... } R r = denotes the relay set and
{1, 2,.... } N n = be the set of orthogonal subcarriers.
The two-time-slot half-duplex DF cooperation is adopted.
And the destination is assumed to receive signal from the relay
but not from the source because of distance or obstacle.
Additionally, the power spectral densities of additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN) are assumed to be equal at the source
and the relay for analytical simplifying.
In the first time slot, source transmits an OFDM symbol to
the relays. Thus, the channel capacity of
th
k subcarrier
between the source and relay
i
r (1 i r ) can be written as:

, ,
, 2
0
( ) ( )
( ) log (1 )
2 /
i i
i
s r s r
s r
P k G k
B
R k
N N B N
= + (1)
where
,
( )
i
s r
P k denotes the power allocated on
th
k subcarrier
( 1 k n ).
,
( )
i
s r
G k stands for the channel power gain
between source and relay
i
r .
0
N is power spectral densities of
AWGN, and B is the total available bandwidth.
In the second time slot, relay
i
r decodes the signal and
retransmits the message to the base station. Similarity, the
channel capacity of
th
k subcarrier between relay
i
r and
destination is given as:

, ,
, 2
0
( ) ( )
( ) log (1 )
2 /
i i
i
r d r d
r d
P k G k
B
R k
N N B N
= + (2)
where
,
( )
i
r d
P k denotes the power allocated on
th
k subcarrier at
the relay.
,
( )
i
r d
G k stands for the corresponding channel power
gain between relay
i
r and destination on
th
k subcarrier.
In our work, the opportunistic relaying strategy is adopted,
which means that only one proper relay is selected to forward
the message on
th
k subcarrier. If relay
i
r is selected to forward
the data of
th
k subcarrier, the corresponding channel capacity
on
th
k subcarrier is calculated as:

, , , ,
( ) min{ ( ), ( )}
i i i
s r d s r r d
R k R k R k = (3)
Here we consider to maximum the uplink throughput of
the system, so we can formulate it as an optimization problem.
The optimization problem is given as:

( )
, , ,
, , ,
( ), ( ),
1 1
, , ,
1 1
, ,
,
,
1
max min{ ( ), ( )}
:
( ) ( )
( ), ( ) 0
{0,1} ,
1
i i
s r r d i k
i i
i i
i i
N R
i k s r r d
P k P k
k i
N R
i k s r r d total
k i
s r r d
i k
R
i k
i
R k R k
subject to
P k P k P
P k P k i R
i k
k

= =
= =
=
+

=
=

(4)
where
total
P is the total system power constraint.
, i k
can only
be either 1 or 0, indicating whether the relay
i
r is chosen to
forward the data of
th
k subcarrier. Note that first constraint is
based on the aggregate power. And the last constraint
indicates that each subcarrier can only be allocated to one
relay to forward to the base station for the opportunistic
relaying strategy.
Theoretically, the optimization problem is a mixed binary
integer programming. Since the relay selection and power
allocation are coupling to make the optimization complicated,
it is hard to find the global optimum in terms of computational
complexity. Thus, the suboptimal algorithm with low
computational complexity should be found for practical
implementation. Therefore, we decomposed the joint resource
allocation problem into two sub-problems of opportunistic
relaying strategy and power allocation between source and
relay.
III. OPPORTUNISTIC RELAYING STRATEGY
For each subcarrier, there are potential Rrelays could
help forward the data to destination in the network, which
correspond to R possible relay selection strategy. Due to
simplification of the signaling and feedback overhead,
opportunistic relaying was adopted in this work. Thus the
source node compares the R relay channels and selects the
best relay node to send uplink data. Thus, in order to decide
the relay selection strategy, a criterion should be found to
evaluate the performance of each subcarrier at first.
For given total transmission power ( ) P k on
th
k subcarrier,
let , 1 (0,1) denote the fractions factor of total power
( ) P k allocated at the source and relay respectively. So we
have
,
( ) ( )
i
s r
P k P k = and
.
( ) (1 ) ( )
i
r d
P k P k = .Thus the
corresponding channel capacity on
th
k subcarrier in (3) can be
re-written as:

,
, , 2
0
,
2
0
( ) ( )
( ) min{ log (1 ),
2 /
(1 ) ( ) ( )
log (1 )}
2 /
i
i
i
s r
s r d
r d
P k G k
B
R k
N N B N
P k G k
B
N N B N

= +

+
(5)
Note that the first term is a monotonically increasing
function of , and the second term is a monotonically
decreasing function of in (5). Therefore, the optimal power
allocation at
th
k subcarrier can be easily gotten:

, ,
2 2
0 0
( ) ( ) (1 ) ( ) ( )
log (1 ) log (1 )
2 / 2 /
i i
s r r d
Pk G k Pk G k
B B
N NB N N NB N

+ = +
(6)
Thus the fractional factor of power allocation can be
deduced as:

,
, ,
( )
( ) ( )
i
i i
r d
s r r d
G k
G k G k
=
+
(7)
So the optimization rate of
th
k subcarrier can be written
as:
Joint Optimization of Opportunistic Relaying and Power Allocation in Cooperative OFDM Networks

, , *
, , 2
0
( ) ( )
( ) log (1 )
2 /
i
i
s r d
s r d
P k G k
B
R k
N N B N
= + (8)
where the equivalent channel power gain at
th
k subcarrier can
be expressed as:

, ,
, ,
, ,
( ) ( )
( )
( ) ( )
i i
i
i i
s r r d
s r d
s r r d
G k G k
G k
G k G k
=
+
(9)
Therefore, for given total average transmission power of
( ) P k at
th
k subcarrier, our opportunistic relaying strategy is to
select the relay with the largest equivalent channel gain, which
results in the largest channel capacity at
th
k subcarrier. That is,
the best relay
i
r node for
th
k subcarrier is selected as:

*
, ,
arg max ( )
i
i s r d
i R
r G k

= (10)
Hence in our opportunistic relaying strategy, the
equivalent gain on each subcarrier in (9) is computed and the
best relay node is found according to (10).
IV. SUBOPTIMAL POWER ALLOCATION
With the opportunistic relaying strategy proposed in
Section III, the optimization problem in (4) can be simplified
as:

( )
* *
* *
, ,
* *
* *
, ,
( ), ( )
1
, ,
1
, ,
max min{ ( ), ( )}
:
( ) ( )
( ), ( ) 0
i i
s r r d
i i
i i
i i
N
s r r d
P k P k
k
N
total
s r r d
k
s r r d
R k R k
subject to
P k P k P
P k P k i R
=
=
+

(11)
where relay
*
i
r is chosen according to (10) for each
subcarrier.
It can be seen that the original problem in (4) is
transformed into a convex optimization problem. And the
computably complexity of this convex optimization problem
would increase rapidly with the number of subcarriers. Thus a
suboptimal method with low-complexity power allocation
scheme should be proposed.
Let us assuming that N=1, which means that only one
subcarrier in the networks, it can be easily calculated that the
optimal power allocation scheme should be satisfied with:
* *
, ,
, ,
( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
i i
i i
s r r d
s r s r
P k G k P k G k = .It means that if the power
allocation among each subcarrier is given, then the optimal
power fractional faction between source and relay is gotten.
Motivated by this extreme condition, thus we decomposed the
power allocation problem into two steps as followings.
A. Power Allocation among the subcarriers
Note that if our opportunistic relaying strategy at each
subcarrier is gotten, then the corresponding equivalent channel
power gain ( ) G k at
th
k subcarrier can be calculated as (9).
Thus the power allocation problem among subcarriers can be
written as:

2
( )
1 0
1
( ) ( )
max log (1 )
2 /
:
( )
N
P k
k
N
total
k
B P k G k
N N B N
subject to
P k P
=
=
+

(12)
where ( ) P k stands for the total power allocated at
th
k subcarrier. It is clear that the optimal power allocation is
water-filling solution [12]. So using Lagrange optimization
method, power allocation scheme among the subcarriers is
calculated as:

0
/ 2 ln 2
( )
( )
N B N N
P k
B G k
+

=


(13)
where ( ) max( , 0) x x
+
.And should satisfied the total
system power constraint.
B. Power Allocation between the source and the relay on
each subcarrier
If the power allocation among subcarriers is gotten, the
optimal power faction between source and relay should satisfy
with:
, , , ,
( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
i i i i
s r s r r d r d
P k G k P k G k = .Thus, the power
allocation distributed at the source and relay is calculated as:

,
,
, ,
,
,
, ,
( ) ( )
( )
( ) ( )
( ) ( )
( )
( ) ( )
i
i
i i
i
i
i i
r d
s r
s r r d
s r
r d
s r r d
G k P k
P k
G k G k
G k P k
P k
G k G k
=
+
=
+
(14)
So our sub-optimal power allocation algorithm can be
summarized as:
1) calculate the equivalent channel power gain in (9)
and allocate the power among each subcarrier according
to (13).
2) allocate the power between source and relay for each
subcarrier using (14).
Therefore, the complexity of the suboptimal power
allocation algorithm presented in this section consists of two
parts: 1) PA among subcarriers with the complexity of O(K),
2) PA between source and relay on each subcarrier with the
complexity of O(K). Hence, the complexity of the proposed
algorithm is O(2K), in which the complexity is linear in the
number of subcarrier, which is attractive in practical
application for OFDM networks.
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section, we present simulation results to show the
performance of the proposed joint opportunistic relaying
strategy and power allocation algorithm.
In our simulation, the wireless channel is modeled as a
frequency-selective channel consisting of six independent
Rayleigh multi-paths. Each multi-path component is modeled
as Clarkes flat fading model. It is assumed that the power
delay profile is exponentially decaying with
2l
e

, where l is
the multi-path index. The total available bandwidth is 1 MHz.
Proceedings of the 15th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC 2009)-078

and there are N = 64 subcarriers in the system. The power

spectral density of AWGN is 80dBgW/Hz.
Figure 2 compares the system throughput of the three
schemes including 1) our proposed joint optimization method;
2) OR without PA scheme, in which equal power allocation is
adopted; 3) Random selection with PA, in which the relay is
selected randomly. From the figure, it can be seen that our
proposed method achieve best performance. Moreover our
proposed method has gained 2dB cooperative gain than OR
without PA scheme, and 5dB cooperative gain than random
selection with PA scheme. In addition, OR without PA can
obtain better performance than random selection with PA,
which indicated that the efficient of relay selection strategy is
much better than that of power allocation in cooperative
communication.
Figure 3 shows the performance of system throughput with
various relays. It is obvious the more relays in the network, the
higher uplink throughput can be achieved. For the number of
relays increasing in the networks, at any one time there is a
high probability that one of the relays will have a strong
channel power gain, which result in higher throughput with
OR strategy.
0 5 10 15 20
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
4.5
SNR(dB)
C
a
p
a
c
i
t
y
(
b
i
t
/
s
/
H
z
)


Proposed method
OR wi thou PA
Random selection with PA

Figure 2. the performance of system througput of three transmission
schemes with R=8
0 5 10 15 20
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
4.5
5
5.5
SNR(dB)
C
a
p
a
c
i
t
y
(
b
i
t
/
s
/
H
z
)


R=2
R=4
R=6

Figure 3. the performance of system througput with various relays
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we consider the uplink scenario of a cellular
cooperative OFDM networks, in which multi-relay can forward
the sources message to base station. The uplink throughput is
optimized by using DF opportunistic relaying. We show that
the problem is formulated as a mixed binary integer
programming problem, which is prohibitive to find the global
optimum in terms of complexity. Thus we divided the joint
resource allocation problem into two sub-problems of
opportunistic relaying strategy and power allocation. And the
complexity of the proposed algorithm is linear in the number of
subcarrier, which is attractive in practical application for
OFDM networks. The simulation result shows that the
proposed scheme can improve the system throughput
efficiently.
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Joint Optimization of Opportunistic Relaying and Power Allocation in Cooperative OFDM Networks