Robust Cognitive Beamforming With Bounded Channel Uncertainties

This paper studies the robust beamforming design for a multi-antenna cognitive radio (CR) network, which transmits to multiple secondary users (SUs) and coexists with a primary network of multiple users. We aim to maximize the minimum of the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINRs) of the SUs, subject to the constraints of the total SU transmit power and the received interference power at the primary users (PUs) by optimizing the beamforming vectors at the SU transmitter based on imperfect channel state information (CSI). To model the uncertainty in CSI, we consider a bounded region for both cases of channel matrices and channel covariance matrices. As such, the optimization is done while satisfying the interference constraints for all possible CSI error realizations. We shall first derive equivalent conditions for the interference constraints and then convert the problems into the form of semi-definite programming (SDP) with the aid of rank relaxation, which leads to iterative algorithms for obtaining the robust optimal beamforming solution. Results demonstrate the achieved robustness and the performance gain over conventional approaches and that the proposed algorithms can obtain the exact robust optimal solution with high probability.      

A Two-Way MIMO Relaying Scheme with Partial Channel State Information

In this paper, an mean squared error-optimal relaying scheme is presented for two-way multiple-input multiple-output cooperative relaying systems where only partial channel state information (CSI) is available at the relays due to the high speed mobility. By considering two typical CSI scenarios, namely, fixed relays and high-velocity mobile relays, an optimum relaying scheme is designed for multi-antenna relays. The difficulty of the optimizations lies in the unknown channel response and the special structure of the block diagonal relaying matrix. It is proved that the optimization problem can be converted to an easy-to-solve problem by performing matrix manipulations and employing the channel statistics, such that the Lagrangian multiplier method is ready to be used to obtain an analytical solution. Simulation study is conducted to justify the superior performance of the proposed two-way relaying scheme.     

Maximizing the minimum achievable rates in Cognitive Radio networks subject to stochastic constraints

In this paper, considering errors in estimating the channel state information (CSI), we investigate the problem of robust beamforming in cognitive radio (CR) networks to maximize the minimum achievable rates for secondary users (SU). In addition to the constraints on the transmit power of the users, stochastic constraints on the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) at SUs and interference power at the primary users (PU) are imposed to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) of the network. Bernstein inequalities and semi-definite relaxation are used to transform stochastic constraints to equivalent deterministic inequalities. By replacing new deterministic constraints in the optimization problem and defining new matrices, we write the problem of finding optimal beamforming weights in the form of quasiconvex optimization problem. Generalization of the Dinkelbach’s method is used to obtain optimal beamforming weights. Also, the problem of finding optimum beamforming weights is solved for the case that perfect CSI is available at the transmitters. Simulation results confirm that, the proposed method provides higher achievable rates in comparison with the previous works that minimize the total transmit power. The proposed method is robust because stochastic constraints are satisfied while the estimation of CSI includes some errors.     

Optimal cooperative beamforming design in cognitive radio networks with multiple secondary user links

In this paper, a novel beamforming method is proposed for a more realistic cognitive radio system with several secondary transmitters and receivers, a number of relays, and 1 primary transmitter and receiver. When the primary user link is idle, all secondary transmitters access temporal spectrum holes to simultaneously broadcast their information to the relays each associated with an infinite buffer. In the next stage, the relays transmit the information to the secondary receivers using a cooperative beamforming method no matter whether primary user link is silent or not. The proposed method of designing the beamforming vector enables the system to maximize the power received by the secondary users while maintaining the interference plus noise power at the primary user receiver below a predefined threshold. Results of simulations confirm validity of the method and improved performance compared to the zero‐forcing beamforming. The impact of channel quality between nodes on the performance of the system is also investigated.     

多天线双向中继转发的优化方法研究

本文对多天线双向中继放大转发方案进行了研究。首先,基于最小化均方误差的准则,通过对上行链路和下行链路进行联合优化,推导出了相应的中继优化方法,该优化方法能够实现最优的链路可靠性。然后,基于该优化方法,利用部分信道状态信息和信道统计信息,针对固定中继和移动中继两种不同的通信场景,分别设计了不同参数控制下的鲁棒性实现。理论分析和计算机仿真都表明所提方案具有明显的性能增益。      

Energy Harvesting in Cognitive Networks with Cooperative Beamforming: Power Allocation and Stability Analysis

Energy harvesting (EH) is a promising technology to improve both energy efficiency and spectral efficiency in cognitive radio (CR) networks. However, due to the randomness of the harvested energy and the interference constraint at the primary users (PUs), the limited transmission power of secondary users (SUs) may reduce the service rate of SUs. To solve this problem, this paper investigates a cooperative transmission method where a zero-forcing beamforming method is used in the EH based secondary network. Considering the transmission power constraint and energy causality, we derive the closed-form solution of the optimal transmission power for the secondary source and relays, which achieves the maximal stable throughput of the secondary network. Numerical results show the impact of different system parameters to the maximal stable throughput. In addition, compared with the traditional decode-and-forward (DF) scheme, the cooperative beamforming method achieves higher stable throughput under an high quality source-to-relay channel.     

Robust beamforming in cognitive radio

This letter considers the multi-antenna cognitive radio (CR) network, which has a single secondary user (SU) and coexists with a primary network of multiple users. Our objective is to maximize the service probability of the SU, subject to the interference constraints on the primary users (PUs) in the form of probability. Exploiting imperfect channel state information (CSI), with its error modeled by added Gaussian noise, we address the optimization for the beamforming weights at the secondary transmitter. In particular, this letter devises an iterative algorithm that can efficiently obtain the robust optimal beamforming solution. For the case with one PU, we show that a much simpler algorithm based on a closed-form solution for the antenna weights of a given power can be presented. Numerical results reveal that the optimal solution for the constructed problem provides an effective means to tradeoff the performance between the PUs and the SU, bridging the non-robust and worstcase based systems.     

Interference‐resistant cooperative wireless networks based on complementary codes

Spatial diversity in wireless networks can be attained by exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless transmission without the need of multiple antennas in individual device, leading to the implementation of cooperative communication. While most prior works focused on the single source—destination scenario, it should be more realistic to consider how to induce cooperation among multiple source‐destination pairs assisted by multiple relays. In such a case, multiple access interference (MAI) may present due to asynchronous transmissions of the users and relays. In this paper, a cooperative network architecture based on orthogonal complementary (OC) codes inherently immune to MAI is proposed. To efficiently utilize the scarce radio spectrum and codes, a centralized medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed to coordinate the code assignment and channel access among users and relays. We theoretically analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed OC coded cooperative network over multipath Rayleigh fading channel. The performance gain resulted from different numbers of relays is investigated, and compared with a time division multiple access (TDMA) based cooperative scheme. We show that the proposed OC coded cooperative network performs well in the presence of timing offset, and thus is well suited for asynchronous uplink transmission with cooperative relaying. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robust Relaying Schemes for Multiple-Antenna Multi-Relay Networks

The optimal beamforming weight matrix for amplify and forward multiple-antenna multiple-relay network is investigated. It is assumed that the partial first and second hop channel state information (CSI) is available at relays. In order to minimize the mean square error (MSE) at destination, all relay weight matrices must be designed simultaneously under individual relay power constraints. Using the Lagrange dual variables, it is shown that this general vector optimization problem can be converted into a scalar optimization problem whose scalar Lagrange multipliers can be obtained numerically. This is the generalized version of the scheme suggested for complete CSI. The proposed scheme is evaluated through computer simulation with various numbers of relays and antennas to obtain MSE and bit error rate (BER) metrics. It is also shown that the resulting MSE and BER are less than those of the schemes available in the literature by a good margin depending upon the amount of the utilized relay and antennas as well as the estimation error.     

Opportunistic Beamforming over Rayleigh Channels with Partial Side Information

In recent years, diversity techniques have evolved into highly attractive technology for wireless communications in different forms. For instance, the channel fluctuations of the users in a network are exploited as multiuser diversity by scheduling the user with the best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). When fading is slow, beamforming at a multiple antenna transmitter is used to induce artificial channel fluctuations to ensure multiuser diversity in the network. Such a beamforming scheme is called opportunistic beamforming since the transmitter uses random beamforming to artificially induce opportunism in the network [1]. Opportunism requires a large number of users in the system in order to reach the performance of the true beamforming that uses perfect channel state information (CSI). In this paper we investigate the benefit of having partial CSI at an opportunistic transmitter. In the investigation, we focus on the maximum normalized SNR scheduling where user?s feedback consists of SNR relative to its channel gain. We show that opportunism can be beneficially used to increase the average throughput of the system. Simulations support the analytical average throughput results obtained as the amount of CSI and the number of users vary.     

Interference-limited opportunistic relaying with reactive sensing

This work evaluates opportunistic relaying in the presence of thermal noise as well as interference, when channel sensing is conducted reactively, in slow fading environments. The studied scenario employs a single gateway that provides access towards several destinations with weak links and exploits a network of intermediate relays. In sharp contrast to prior art, no inter-relay channel state information or communication is assumed, no network coding is needed, while low-complexity receivers at each destination are employed. It is shown that information can be relayed without delay, while harvesting benefits of cooperative diversity, even at the presence of interference. The participating relays are required to offer strong paths towards source and destination, while at the same time they are as "isolated" as possible from each other. From that perspective, the notion of relay "usefulness" is redefined in both noise and interference-limited environments, under opportunistic relaying.     

Zero-forcing dirty paper coding aided physical-layer network coding for MIMO two-way relaying channels with multiple users

This article considers the two-way multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relaying channels with multiple users, in which multiple users are served simultaneously by the base station (BS) with the assistance of the relay. The transmission consists of only two phases, doubling the system throughout over traditional one-way half-duplex transmission. A zero-forcing dirty paper coding (ZFDPC) aided physical-layer network coding (PNC) scheme is proposed in this article and the achievable capacity of the ZFDPC aided PNC scheme is derived. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the previous decode-and-forward (DF) and zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) aided PNC scheme due to more degrees of freedoms and the advantage of PNC. Moreover, we analyze the effect of the imperfect channel state information (CSI) from RS to users at BS side to show the robustness of the proposed ZFDPC aided PNC scheme.     

Outage Probability Based Robust Distributed Beam-Forming in Multi-User Cooperative Networks with Imperfect CSI

In this paper, a new robust problem is proposed for relay beamforming in relay system with stochastic perturbation on channels of multi user and relay network. The robust problem aims to minimize the transmission power of relay nodes while the imperfect channel information (CSI) injects stochastic channel uncertainties to the parameters of optimization problem. In the power minimization framework, the relays amplification weights and phases are optimized assuming the availability of Gaussian channel distribution. The power sum of all relays is minimized while the outage probability of the instantaneous capacity (or SINR) at each link is above the outage capacity (or SINR) for each user. The robust problem is a nonconvex SDP problem with Rank constraint. Due to the nonconvexity of the original problem, three suboptimal problems are proposed. Simulation and numerical results are presented to compare the performance of the three proposed solutions with the existing worst case robust method.     

On Time-Frequency Resource Leasing in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this work, we introduce a new spectrum leasing based cognitive radio for OFDM-based primary/secondary networks. More precisely, we propose a new leasing scheme both in time and frequency domains in a network composed of a primary transmission and some secondary (cognitive) users forming a cooperative relay network. In the proposed scheme, the primary user decides to lease a part of its available resources (time and frequency) to a selected set of relays, with the aim of increasing its link reliability. The selected relays use a part of the leased resources for relaying the primary signal, and in counterpart, they are allowed to exploit the rest of the frame for their own data transmission. By defining appropriate cost functions, the proposed algorithm decides whether it is of advantage for the primary user to cooperate with the relay network or not. Moreover, if cooperation is advantageous for the primary network, the algorithm selects the optimal amount of the time-frequency resources (number of OFDM symbols and subcarriers) that are involved in the cooperation process. Simulation results show that by using the proposed relaying scheme, both primary and secondary (relay) networks can take advantage in terms of achievable data rates compared to classical leasing systems.     

Distributed differential space-time coding for asynchronous two-way relaying networks with Nakagami-m fading

A signal detection scheme was proposed for two-way relaying networks (TWRNs) using distributed differential space-time coding (DDSTC) under imperfect synchronization. Unlike most existing work perfect with synchronization assumed, a relative delay between the signals transmitted from both sources to the relay was considered. Since perfect channel state information (CSI) is difficult to be acquired in fast fading, the scenarios and computation complexity will be increased especially when there appear multiple relays, CSI is assumed unavailable at all nodes. Therefore, the article proposes a differential signal detection scheme based on estimating and cancelling the imperfect synchronization component in the received signal at the two source nodes, followed by a least square (LS) decoder. Simulations, using the Nakagami-m fading channel due to its versatile statistical distribution property, show that the proposed scheme for both source nodes are effective in suppressing the inter-symbol interference (ISI) caused by imperfect synchronization while neither the source nodes nor the relay nodes have any knowledge of CSI.     

Optimal received SINR balancing based on cooperative beamforming in cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we investigate a two‐step cooperative cognitive radio network, which consists of two secondary links, a number of relays, and one primary link. During the first step, the primary link is assumed to be idle; both secondary sources simultaneously broadcast their data to the relay network. During the second step, the relay network employs a proposed cooperative beamforming (CBF) scheme and transmits the received data toward both of the secondary destinations (no matter whether the primary link is idle or not). The proposed CBF scheme enables the investigated network to simultaneously maximize received signal to interference plus noise ratio at both of the secondary destinations while keeping interference plus noise power at the primary destination under a predefined threshold. Indeed, the proposed scheme represents an optimal received signal to interference plus noise ratio balancing approach based on CBF, which guarantees the required quality of service for the primary link and also both secondary links. We optimize the CBF vector by relaxing the optimization problem to a convex semidefinite programming and solving with the bisection search algorithm. Numerical results show the efficiency and robustness of our approach. A comparison of our approach with the zero‐forcing beamforming method is also presented. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Opportunistic Relaying in Wireless Networks

Relay networks having n source-to-destination pairs and m half-duplex relays, all operating in the same frequency band and in the presence of block fading, are analyzed. This setup has attracted significant attention, and several relaying protocols have been reported in the literature. However, most of the proposed solutions require either centrally coordinated scheduling or detailed channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter side. Here, an opportunistic relaying scheme is proposed that alleviates these limitations, without sacrificing the system throughput scaling in the regime of large n. The scheme entails a two-hop communication protocol, in which sources communicate with destinations only through half-duplex relays. All nodes operate in a completely distributed fashion, with no cooperation. The key idea is to schedule at each hop only a subset of nodes that can benefit from multiuser diversity. To select the source and destination nodes for each hop, CSI is required at receivers (relays for the first hop, and destination nodes for the second hop), and an index-valued CSI feedback at the transmitters. For the case when n is large and m is fixed, it is shown that the proposed scheme achieves a system throughput of m/2 bits/s/Hz. In contrast, the information-theoretic upper bound of (m/2) log log n bits/s/Hz is achievable only with more demanding CSI assumptions and cooperation between the relays. Furthermore, it is shown that, under the condition that the product of block duration and system bandwidth scales faster than log n log log n, the achievable throughput of the proposed scheme scales as Theta (log n). Notably, this is proven to be the optimal throughput scaling even if centralized scheduling is allowed, thus proving the optimality of the proposed scheme in the scaling law sense. Simulation results indicate a rather fast convergence to the asymptotic limits with the system's size, demonstrating the practical importance of the scaling results.     

拥有多天线源节点的放大转发双向中继信道机会中继策略研究

We consider a two-way relay network where the Amplify-and-Forward (AF) protocol is adopted by all relays in this paper. The network consists of two multi-antenna source nodes and multiple distributed single-antenna relays. Two opportunistic relaying schemes are proposed to efficiently utilize the antennas of the source nodes and the relay nodes. In the first scheme, the best relay is selected out by a max-min-max criterion before transmitting. After that, at each source, only the antenna with the largest channel gain between itself and the best relay is activated to transmit and receive signals with full power. In the second scheme, assisted by the best relay which is selected by the typical max-min criterion, both source nodes use all their antennas to exchange data, and match filter beamforming techniques are employed at both source nodes. Further analyses show that all schemes can achieve the full diversity order, and the conclusions are not only mathematically demonstrated but numerically illustrated. System performance comparisons are carried out by numerical methods in terms of rate sum and outage probability, respectively. The beamforming assisted scheme can be found to be superior to the antenna selection scheme when accurate Channel State Information (CSI) is available at the transmitters. Otherwise, the latter is very suitable.     

Joint Clustering Relay Selection and Beamforming in Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks

This paper proposes a joint clustering relay selection and beamforming method for a more realistic cooperative cognitive radio network, in which a secondary network of multiple secondary links and a relay network coexist with a primary network of one primary link. We aim to improve performance of the system in terms of maximizing the received signal power of the secondary destinations, subject to the constraint of received interference plus noise power of the primary destination using the proposed method. Since different relays cooperate differently towards the signals at the secondary and primary destinations, the proposed method can improve the performance of the system and enables the relay network to simultaneously transmit signals of all secondary links toward the destinations by clustering the relays. Results of simulations confirm validity of the method and improve the system performance compared to the existing cooperative beamforming and Zero-Forcing beamforming, in which no relay selection strategy is used.     

基于非理想CSI的下行MU-MIMO鲁棒波束成形

在下行多用户多入多出（MU-MIMO）系统中,基站（BS）所获得的非理想信道状态信息（CSI）会导致频分双工（FDD）系统预编码性能变差.现有的MU-MIMO鲁棒预编码算法虽然可以对抗非理想CSI所导致的系统性能损失,但其只考虑其中一种或两种信道误差的鲁棒性,因此系统性能提升有限.本文通过建立包含信道估计误差、量化误差和延时误差的联合信道误差模型,推导出具有集中式特性的基于最小均方误差（MMSE）的鲁棒波束成形矩阵的闭式解;随后将这种信道条件应用到分布式通信系统,并推导出具有分布式特性的基于信号泄露的MMSE的鲁棒波束成形矩阵的闭式解.数值分析表明,本文所提的集中式和分布式MU-MIMO波束成形算法,与只考虑量化误差的鲁棒MMSE算法相比,具有更优的系统和速率与误码率,补偿了上述三种信道误差所导致的预编码性能损失.