Beamforming in Wireless Relay Networks

This paper is on relay beamforming in wireless networks, in which the receiver has perfect information of all channels and each relay knows its own channels. Instead of the commonly used total power constraint on relays and the transmitter, we use a more practical assumption that every node in the network has its own power constraint. A two-step amplify-and-forward protocol with beamforming is used, in which the transmitter and relays are allowed to adaptively adjust their transmit power and directions according to available channel information. The optimal beamforming problem is solved analytically. The complexity of finding the exact solution is linear in the number of relays. Our results show that the transmitter should always use its maximal power and the optimal power used at a relay is not a binary function. It can take any value between zero and its maximum transmit power. Also, interestingly, this value depends on the quality of all other channels in addition to the relay's own ones. Despite this coupling fact, distributive strategies are proposed in which, with the aid of a low-rate broadcast from the receiver, a relay needs only its own channel information to implement the optimal power control. Simulated performance shows that network beamforming achieves full diversity and outperforms other existing schemes.