6. Final comments
In this work, we presented an analysis of the optimal power allocation in an LDPC coded cooperative network with a single relay operating with the AF protocol. The BER, channel capacity and outage probability were used as performance metrics to find the optimal power distribution between the source and the relay in two cooperative scenarios. We identify scenarios for which the choice of LDPC codes with non-binary fields provide coding gains relative to LDPC binary codes. In general, the optimal power allocation predicted by the LDPC performance simulation and by the capacity/outage probability results are in good agreement. The equal power allocation scheme tends to the optimal when the relay gets closer to the source. We compared the power allocation and the system performance of the cooperative system to those of the point-to-point communication system. We also observed that the optimal energy ratio does not depend on the field size.