Distributed Beamforming Using a Consensus Algorithm for Cooperative Relay Networks

For distributed beamforming with multiple relay nodes (RNs), we consider a minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion with a dual decomposition method and consensus algorithm to decide relay weights for RNs with local communications between RNs. It is shown that the proposed MMSE-based distributed beamforming has a comparable performance to the maximum signal to noise ratio (MSNR) based distributed beamforming at medium to low signal to noise ratio (SNR) or with a smaller number of RNs.