Beamforming design for coordinated direct and relay systems

Joint processing of multiple communication flows in wireless systems has given rise to a number of novel transmission techniques, notably the two-way relaying based on wireless network coding. Recently, a related set of techniques has emerged, termed coordinated direct and relay (CDR) transmissions, where the constellation of traffic flows is more general than the two-way. Regardless of the actual traffic flows, in a CDR scheme the relay has a central role in managing the interference. In this paper we investigate the novel transmission modes, based on amplify-and-forward, that arise when the relay is equipped with multiple antennas and can use beamforming. We focus on one representative traffic type, with two downlink users and consider three different beamforming criteria: egoistic, altruistic, and sum-rate maximization. The sum-rate criterion leads to a non-convex problem and we introduce an iterative solution, as well as derive an upper performance bound. The numerical results demonstrate a clear benefit from usage of multiple antennas at the relay node.