Cross-layer design of combining AMC with HARQ in cooperative relay system with perfect and imperfect CSI

A cross-layer design which combines adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) at the physical layer with a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocol at the data link layer (LL) is presented, in cooperative relay system over Nakagami-m fading channels with perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI). In order to maximize spectral efficiency (SE) under delay and packet error rate (PER) performance constraints, a state transition model and an optimization framework with perfect CSI are presented. Then the framework is extended to cooperative relay system with imperfect CSI. The numerical results show that the scheme can achieve maximum SE while satisfying transmitting delay requirements. Compared with the imperfect CSI, the average PER with perfect CSI is much lower and the spectral efficiency is much higher.