Amplify-and-Forward Capacity with Transmit Beamforming for MIMO Multiple-Relay Channels

In this paper, we consider a MIMO wireless relay network where communication between a source and a destination node is assisted by multiple relay nodes using the amplify-and-forward (AF) strategy. We consider a system where the source node multiplexes the information into parallel streams and uses disjoint subsets of relays to assist the transmission of each stream. Furthermore, we assume that the source and the destination have the same number of antennas and that each transmit antenna is virtually paired to a different destination antenna. We consider source node channel side information (CSI) availability of just the source-relay and source-destination links, and propose a source beamforming method based on maximizing the sum of signal-to-leakage ratios (SSLR) for all of the data streams. This method maximizes the sum of signal strengths at the set of relay nodes assigned to that stream while suppressing the interference to other relay nodes. Maximizing the SSLR reduces the propagation of interference terms in the AF strategy and results in significant performance gains.