Robust Collaborative-Relay Beamforming

Relay communications is a promising technique to extend the range of wireless communications by forwarding the message from the sender to the intended destination. While fixed or variable-power relays have been previously investigated, this paper addresses the collaborative use of variable-phase variable-power amplify-and-forward (AF) relays for robust beamforming, with the aid of imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the sender. In particular, the maximization of the worst-case signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination terminal is studied under a bounded spherical region for the norm of the CSI error vector from the relays to the destination. Our main contribution is that we prove, under a condition on the quality of the estimated CSI, the robust-optimal collaborative-relay beamforming (CRBF) can be obtained by S-procedure and rank relaxation techniques. In addition, a distributed algorithm is developed by examining the structure of the optimal CRBF solution. Results demonstrate a significant gain of CRBF over non-robust approaches.