Opportunistic cooperation by dynamic resource allocation

We consider a Rayleigh fading wireless relay channel where communication is constrained by delay and average power limitations. Assuming partial channel state information at the transmitters and perfect channel state information at the receivers, we first study the delay-limited capacity of this system and show that, contrary to a single source-single destination case, a non-zero delay-limited capacity is achievable. We introduce opportunistic decode-and-forward (ODF) protocol which utilizes the relay depending on the channel state. Opportunistic cooperation significantly improves the delay-limited capacity of the system and performs very close to the cut-set bound. We also consider the system performance in terms of minimum outage probability. We show that ODF provides performance close to the cut-set bound from the outage probability perspective as well. Our results emphasize the importance of feedback for cooperative systems that have delay sensitive applications. © 2007 IEEE.