An overview of beamforming and power allocation for MIMO relays

This paper provides an overview of the design of transmit and receive beamformers and transmit power allocation for MIMO relays. Soft and hard methods for interference cancelation are presented, which play a critical role for all MIMO relays whether they are full-duplex or half-duplex, regenerative or non-regenerative, one-way relay or two-way relay. A perspective of MIMO relays in a network of many hops is illustrated. A distinction is made between feedback loop of energy and feedback loop of noise. Subspace computation and a generalized water-filling (GWF) algorithm are shown as important building blocks for the design.