Antenna combining and power allocation-assisted multiple-input multiple-output cooperative communications: A joint approach

In this study, the authors present a particle swarm optimisation (PSO) scheme for the joint issue of antenna combing (AC) and power allocation in order to concurrently enhance throughput and reduce hardware cost for multiple-input multiple-output cooperative systems. In the proposed scheme, each particle´s position is characterised by three matrices: the receive AC matrix of the cooperative relay; the receive AC matrix of the destination node; and the power allocation matrix of the cooperative relay. Based on the constrained maximisation of mutual information, the proposed scheme carries out the PSO´s iterative update mechanisms to concurrently refine the position of each particle until the largest mutual information is attained. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is guaranteed to converge, outperforms existing schemes of antenna selection or power allocation at the price of higher computational load and achieves near-optimal capacity of the benchmark (full radio frequency (RF) chains) scheme at a significant saving of RF chains.