Abstract: Power allocation has long been one of the most crucial technologies in wireless communications. Research on effective utilization of power has great significance for wireless systems. This paper proposes a novel power allocation scheme for the amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative communication systems to minimize the total transmit power. The simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is introduced here to solve the optimization problem. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms that of equal power allocation scheme in terms of bit error rate and system capacity. 

Key words: amplify-and-forward (AF), cooperative communications, power allocation, simulated annealing (SA) algorithm