Optimal Relay Selection and Power Allocation in an Improved Low-Order-Bit Quantize-and-Forward Scheme

Currently, the quantize-and-forward (QF) scheme with high order modulation and quantization has rather high complexity and it is thus impractical, especially in multiple relay cooperative communications. To overcome these deficiencies, an improved low complex QF scheme is proposed by the combination of the low order binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation and the 1-bit and 2-bit quantization, respectively. In this scheme, the relay selection is optimized by the best relay position for best bit-error-rate (BER) performance, where the relays are located closely to the destination node. In addition, an optimal power allocation is also suggested on a total power constraint. Finally, the BER and the achievable rate of the low order 1-bit, 2-bit and 3-bit QF schemes are simulated and analyzed. Simulation results indicate that the 3-bit QF scheme has about 1.8~5 dB, 4.5~7.5 dB and 1~2.5 dB performance gains than those of the decode-and-forward (DF), the 1-bit and 2-bit QF schemes, at BER of $10^{-2}$, respectively. For the 2-bit QF, the scheme of the normalized Source-Relay (S-R) distance with 0.9 has about 5dB, 7.5dB, 9dB and 15dB gains than those of the distance with 0.7, 0.5, 0.3 and 0.1, respectively, at BER of $10^{-3}$. In addition, the proposed optimal power allocation saves about 2.5dB much more relay power on an average than that of the fixed power allocation. Therefore, the proposed QF scheme can obtain excellent features, such as good BER performance, low complexity and high power efficiency, which make it much pragmatic in the future cooperative communications.