Selection Based Cooperative Beamforming and Power Allocation for Relay Networks

Cooperative beamforming has previously been proven to be an efficient way to improve the cooperative diversity. This method generally requires all relay nodes to participate in beamforming, which can be seen as "all participate" cooperative beamforming. However, not all relay nodes have constructive impacts on the end-to-end bit error rate (BER) performance. Based on this observation, we propose a new cooperative scheme which only selects those "appropriate" relay nodes to perform cooperative beamforming. Such relay nodes can be simply determined with mean channel gains. Therefore, the selection complexity is significantly reduced as global instantaneous channel state information is not required. This scheme guarantees that energy is only allocated to the "appropriate" relay nodes, and hence provides superior diversity. We also prove that power allocation among source and selected relay nodes is a convex problem, and can be resolved with lower computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme achieves an essential improvement in terms of BER performance for both optimal and limited feedback scenarios, as well as high energy-efficiency for the energy-constrained networks.