2006/02/14 by Salman Avestimehr, Avestimehr, Salman, David Tse +1
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced MIMO Systems Optimization #Cooperative Communication and Network Coding #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Wireless Communication Security Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cs/0602050
openalex publication_date 2006/02/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In slow fading scenarios, cooperation between nodes can increase the amount of diversity for communication. We study the performance limit in such scenarios by analyzing the outage capacity of slow fading relay channels. Our focus is on the low SNR and low outage probability regime, where the adverse impact of fading is greatest but so are the potential gains from cooperation. We showed that while the standard Amplify-Forward protocol performs very poorly in this regime, a modified version we called the Bursty Amplify-Forward protocol is optimal and achieves the outage capacity of the network. Moreover, this performance can be achieved without a priori channel knowledge at the receivers. In contrast, the Decode-Forward protocol is strictly sub-optimal in this regime. Our results directly yield the outage capacity per unit energy of fading relay channels.