Efficient Relay Beamforming Design with SIC Detection for Dual-Hop MIMO Relay Networks

Abstract: In this paper, we consider a dual-hop Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) relay wireless network, in which a source-destination pair both equipped with multiple antennas communicates through a large number of half-duplex amplify-and-forward (AF) relay terminals. Two novel linear beamforming schemes based on the matched filter (MF) and regularized zero-forcing (RZF) precoding techniques are proposed for the MIMO relay system. We focus on the linear process at the relay nodes and design the new relay beamformers by utilizing the channel state information (CSI) of both backward channel and forward channel. The proposed beamforming designs are based on the QR decomposition (QRD) filter at the destination node which performs successive interference cancellation (SIC) to achieve the maximum spatial multiplexing gain. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed beamformers that fulfil both the intranode array gain and distributed array gain outperform other relaying schemes under different system parameters in terms of the ergodic capacity.