Capacity Bounds and Power Allocation for Wireless Relay Channels

We consider three-node wireless relay channels in a Rayleigh-fading environment. Assuming transmitter channel state information (CSI), we study upper bounds and lower bounds on the outage capacity and the ergodic capacity. Our studies take into account practical constraints on the transmission/reception duplexing at the relay node and on the synchronization between the source node and the relay node. We also explore power allocation. Compared to the direct transmission and traditional multihop protocols, our results reveal that optimum relay channel signaling can significantly outperform multihop protocols, and that power allocation has a significant impact on the performance.