Virtual MIMO Beamforming and Device Pairing Enabled by Device-to-Device Communications for Multidevice Networks

We consider a multidevice network with asymmetric antenna configurations which supports not only communications between an access point and devices but also device-to-device (D2D) communications for the Internet of things. For the network, we propose the transmit and receive beamforming with the channel state information (CSI) for virtualmultiple-inputmultiple-output (MIMO) enabled by D2D receive cooperation. We analyze the sum rate achieved by a device pair in the proposed method and identify the strategies to improve the sum rate of the device pair. We next present a distributed algorithm and its equivalent algorithm for device pairing to maximize the throughput of the multidevice network. Simulation results confirm the advantages of the transmit CSI and D2D cooperation as well as the validity of the distributive algorithm.