Joint uplink-downlink beamforming in multi-antenna relaying schemes

Abstract

The thesis examines the problem of joint receive and transmit beamforming for a wireless network which consists of one relay node equipped with multiple antennas. The transmitter and the receiver are single antenna systems. The communication system consists of two phases. In the first phase the transmitter sends the information symbol to the relay while in the second phase, the relay re-transmits a linearly transformed version of the vector of its received signals. The concept of general-rank beamforming is applied to this communication scheme for the case of the uplink (transmitter-relay) and downlink (relay-receiver) channel vectors being statistically independent and statistically dependent. In the general-rank beamforming approach, the multi-antenna relay multiplies the received signal vector with a general-rank complex weight matrix and re-transmits each entry of the output vector on the corresponding antenna. The thesis presents a closed form solution to the general-rank beamforming power minimization problem with proof that for statistically independent uplink and downlink channels, the general-rank beamforming approach results in a rank-one solution for the beamforming matrix. The simulation results have shown that when the generalrank beamformer is applied to the case of statistically dependent uplink and downlink channels, the general-rank beamforming technique significantly outperforms the separable receive and transmit beamforming method.