Abstract
In this work, we study the problem of optimal power allocation for decode-and-forward cooperative communications. From the perspective of service quality, rather than minimize the outage probability as much as possible, our goal is to use the minimum power to maintain the outage performance below a specific threshold and thereby conserve the power/energy resource. We investigate two scenarios, a system with diversity and a system without diversity, and propose efficient schemes for finding the optimal power allocation under an outage performance constraint. © 2006 IEEE.