ABSTRACTMobile users with single antennas can still take advantage of spatial diversity through cooperative space–time‐encoded transmission. In this paper, we considered a scheme in which a relay chooses to cooperate only if its source–relay channel is of an acceptable quality, and we evaluate the usefulness of relaying when the source acts blindly and ignores the decision of the relays whether they may cooperate or not. In our study, we consider the regenerative relays in which the decisions to cooperate are based on a targeted end‐to‐end data rateR. We derived the end‐to‐end outage probability for a transmission rateRand a code rateρand look at a power allocation strategy between the source and the relays in order to minimize the end‐to‐end outage probability at the destination for high signal‐to‐noise ratio, by using the golden section search method. Performance results show that the computer simulations‐based results coincide with our analytical results. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.