In this letter, a novel power allocation scheme is proposed to improve the outage performance of an amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative communication network with multiple potential relays under the assumption that only mean channel gains are available at the transmitters. In this scheme, power allocation is studied jointly with a relay selection algorithm which has low computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate the performance improvement of the proposed scheme in terms of outage behavior.

In this letter we investigate the relaying strategies for multihop transmission in wireless networks over Rayleigh fading channels. Theoretical analysis reveals that equally allocating power among all transmitters and placing relays equidistantly on the line between source and destination are optimal in terms of outage capacity. Then equal time duration for the transmission of each hop is also proved to be optimal. Furthermore, the optimum number of hops is also derived and shown to be inversely proportional to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Numerical simulations agree well with the reported theoretical results.