Joint Beamforming and Power Control for Multiantenna Relay Broadcast Channel With QoS Constraints

This paper studies the two-hop relay broadcast channel (BC) for a relay-assisted wireless cellular network where the multiuser independent downlink signals from the base station (BS) are first transmitted to a fixed relay station (RS), and then forwarded by the RS to multiple mobile users. Assuming both the BS and RS are equipped with multiantennas, we study the joint optimization of linear beamforming and power control at the BS and RS so as to minimize their weighted sum-power consumption under the user minimum signal-to-interference-noise-ratio (SINR) quality-of-service (QoS) - constraints. We apply two well-known criteria in the literature, namely, the "SINR balancing" and the "channel-inversion," for the design of linear precoding in the traditional nonrelay-assisted multiantenna BC to the relay-assisted multiantenna BC. First, a convergence-ensured iterative SINR-balancing algorithm is proposed to successively in turn optimize the transmit parameters at one station (BS or RS) with those at the other station being fixed. Second, a joint BS and RS channel-inversion algorithm is proposed together with a novel technique, termed "eigenmode switching," at the RS to reduce the power penalty of the channel inversion. Simulation results show that the proposed joint beamforming and power control schemes provide substantial power savings to achieve the assigned user QoS constraints.