Relay Beamforming for Amplify-and-Forward Multi-Antenna Relay Networks with Energy Harvesting Constraint

Abstract

For amplify-and-forward multi-antenna relay networks with energy harvesting (EH) constraint, we study the optimal relay beamforming problem which maximizes the achievable rate from source to information-decoding receiver subject to the transmit power constraint at relay and the EH constraint at EH receiver. Because of the EH constraint, the beamforming problem is not convex. We propose the optimal beamforming scheme by converting the beamforming problem into a convex semidefinite programming with the rank-one relaxation and Charnes-Cooper transformation. We also propose a suboptimal closed-form beamforming scheme. It is shown from simulations that when the maximum allowable relay transmit power to noise power ratio is high, the performance of proposed suboptimal scheme approaches that of the optimal scheme.