Optimally Joint Subcarrier Pairing and Power Allocation for OFDM System with Multihop Symbol Level DF Relaying

Abstract

Subcarrier pairing (SP) and power allocation (PA) can improve the channel capacity of the OFDM multi-hop relay system. Due to limitations of processing complexity and energy consumption, symbol-level relaying, which only regenerates the constellation symbols at relay nodes, is more practical than code-level relaying that requires full decoding and encoding. By modeling multi-hop symbol-level relaying as a multi-staged parallel binary symmetric channel, this paper introduces a jointly optimal SP and PA scheme which maximizes the end to end data rate. Analytical arguments are given to reveal the structures and properties of the optimal solution, and simulation results are presented to illustrate and justify the optimality.