A full-cooperative diversity beamforming scheme in two-way amplify-and-forward relay systems

Consider a simple two-way relaying channel in which two single-antenna sources exchange information via a multiple-antenna relay. For such a scenario, all the existing approaches that can achieve full cooperative diversity order are based on antenna/relay selection, for which the difficulty in designing the beamforming lies in the fact that a single beamformer needs to serve two destinations. In this paper, a new full-cooperative diversity beamforming scheme that ensures that the relay signals are coherently combined at both destinations is proposed, and analytical results are provided to demonstrate the performance gains. Moreover, the impact of channel estimation error is also evaluated. Finally, numerical results are provided to verify the accuracy of the provided analytical results, and also to show that this proposed scheme can outperform existing schemes based on antenna selection.