Outage Capacity of the Fading Relay Channel in the Low SNR Regime

In this paper we look at the outage capacity of the fading relay channel with half-duplex constraint in the low SNR regime. First we consider the scenario that the channel state information (CSI) is available only at the receiver. In this case we show that a Bursty Amplify-Forward (BAF) protocol is optimal and achieves the outage capacity of this network. But as the channel estimation is quite challenging in the low SNR regime we investigate two extreme scenarios to understand the effect of the channel knowledge on the outage capacity of this network. One extreme is the scenario that neither the transmitter nor the receiver knows the channel state information (non coherent scenario), the other scenario is when this information is available at both the transmitter and the receiver (full CSI). Finally we consider two important extensions of our result. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-0118784 and by a fellowship from the Vodafone Foundation. 1 ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Amir Salman Avestimehr, David N. C. Tse
• Keywords: Channel State Information, CORR 2006, Education, Low Snr Regime, Outage Capacity