Robust relay design for two-way multi-antenna relay systems with imperfect CSI

The paper investigates the problem of designing the multiple-antenna relay in a two-way relay network by taking into account the imperfect channel state information (CSI). The objective is to design the multiple-antenna relay based upon the CSI estimates, where the estimation errors are included to attain the robust design under the worst-case philosophy. In particular, the worst-case transmit power at the multiple-antenna relay is minimized while guaranteeing the worst-case quality of service requirements that the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at both sources are above a prescribed threshold value. Since the worst-case received SNR expression is too complex for subsequent derivation and processing, its lower bound is explored instead by minimizing the numerator and maximizing the denominator of the worst-case SNR. The aforementioned problem is mathematically formulated and shown to be nonconvex. This motivates the pursuit of semidefinite relaxation coupled with a randomization technique to obtain computationally efficient high-quality approximate solutions. This paper has shown that the original optimization problem can be reformulated and then relaxed to a convex problem that can be solved by utilizing suitable randomization loop. Numerical results compare the proposed multiple-antenna relay with the existing non-robust method, and therefore validate its robustness against the channel uncertainty. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed design and the associated influencing factors are discussed by means of extensive Monte Carlo simulations.