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This paper deals with beamforming in wireless relay networks with perfect channel information at the relays, receiver, and transmitter if there is a direct link between the transmitter and receiver. It is assumed that every node in the network has its own power constraint. A two-step amplify-and-forward protocol is used, in which the transmitter and relays not only use match filters to form a beam at the receiver but also adaptively adjust their transmit powers according to the channel strength information. For networks with no direct link, an algorithm is proposed to analytically find the exact solution with linear (in network size) complexity. It is shown that the transmitter should always use its maximal power while the optimal power of a relay can take any value between zero and its maxima. Also, this value depends on the quality of all other channels in addition to the relay's own. Despite this coupling fact, distributive strategies are proposed in which, with the aid of a low-rate receiver broadcast, a relay needs only its own channel information to implement the optimal power control. Then, beamforming in networks with a direct link is considered. When the direct link exists during the first step only, the optimal power control is the same as that of networks with no direct link. For networks with a direct link during the second step only and both steps, recursive numerical algorithms are proposed. Simulation shows that network beamforming achieves the maximal diversity order and outperforms other existing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed space-time coding was proposed to achieve cooperative diversity in wireless relay networks without channel information at the relays. Using this scheme, antennas of the distributive relays work as transmit antennas of the sender and generate a space-time code at the receiver. It achieves the maximal diversity when the transmit power is infinitely large. This paper is on the design of practical distributed space-time codes (DSTCs). We use orthogonal and quasi-orthogonal designs which are originally used in the design of space-time codes for multiple-antenna systems. It is well known that orthogonal space-time codes have full diversity and linear decoding complexity. They are particularly suitable for transmissions in the network setting using distributed space-time coding since their ‘scale-free’ property leads to good performance. Our simulations show that they achieve lower error rates than the random code. We also compare distributed space-time coding to selection decode-and-forward using the same orthogonal designs. Simulations show that distributed space-time coding achieves higher diversity than selection decode-and-forward (DF) when there is more than one relay. We also generalize the distributed space-time coding scheme to wireless relay networks with channel information at the relays. Although our analysis and simulations show that there is no improvement in the diversity, in some networks, having channel information at the relays saves both the transmission power and the transmission time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recently proposed method for communicating with multiple antennas over block fading channels is unitary spacetime modulation (USTM). In this method, the signals transmitted from the antennas, viewed as a matrix with spatial and temporal dimensions, form a unitary matrix, i.e., one with orthonormal columns. Since channel knowledge is not required at the receiver, USTM schemes are suitable for use on wireless links where channel tracking is undesirable or infeasible, either because of rapid changes in the channel characteristics or because of limited system resources. Recent results have shown that if suitably designed, USTM schemes can achieve full channel capacity at high SNR and, moreover, that all this can be done over a single coherence interval, provided the coherence interval and number of transmit antennas are sufficiently large, which is a phenomenon referred to as autocoding. While all this is well recognized, what is not clear is how to generate good performing constellations of (nonsquare) unitary matrices that lend themselves to efficient encoding/decoding. The schemes proposed so far either exhibit poor performance, especially at high rates, or have no efficient decoding algorithms. In this paper, we propose to use the Cayley transform to design USTM constellations. This work can be viewed as a generalization, to the nonsquare case, of the Cayley codes that have been proposed for differential USTM. The codes are designed based on an information-theoretic criterion and lend themselves to polynomial-time (often cubic) near-maximum-likelihood decoding using a sphere decoding algorithm. Simulations suggest that the resulting codes allow for effective high-rate data transmission in multiantenna communication systems without knowing the channel. However, our preliminary results do not show a substantial advantage over training-based schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]