Space-time beamforming for multiuser wireless relay networks

Abstract

The paper is concerned with a multiuser communication network, which is assisted by multiple relays. It has been observed through our previous related works that the conventional simultaneous beamforming at parallel amply-and-forward (AF) relays is not quite effective and often infeasible to target practically desirable signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) at the destinations. To overcome this shortage, we propose the time-division for multiple-user transmission to the relays so the later can perform beamforming on signals received from the individuals and then parallelly forward its combinations at once to the destinations. The optimal beamforming problem is a nonconvex quadratically constrained optimization, which is globally solved by our tailored algorithm of nonsmooth optimization. Its found global optimal solutions are shown very effective and over-perform other possible multi-user relay beamformings.