Abstract-In this paper, the problem of distributed beamforming is considered for a wireless network which consists of a transmitter, a receiver, and relay nodes. For such a network, assuming that the second-order statistics of the channel coefficients are available, we study two different beamforming design approaches. As the first approach, we design the beamformer through minimization of the total transmit power subject to the receiver quality of service constraint. We show that this approach yields a closed-form solution. In the second approach, the beamforming weights are obtained through maximizing the receiver signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) subject to two different types of power constraints, namely the total transmit power constraint and individual relay power constraints. We show that the total power constraint leads to a closed-form solution while the individual relay power constraints result in a quadratic programming optimization problem. The later optimization problem does not have a closed-form solution. However, it is shown that using semidefinite relaxation, this problem can be turned into a convex feasibility semidefinite programming (SDP), and therefore, can be efficiently solved using interior point methods. Furthermore, we develop a simplified, thus suboptimal, technique which is computationally more efficient than the SDP approach. In fact, the simplified algorithm provides the beamforming weight vector in a closed form. Our numerical examples show that as the uncertainty in the channel state information is increased, satisfying the quality of service constraint becomes harder, i.e., it takes more power to satisfy these constraints. Also our simulation results show that when compared to the SDP-based method, our simplified technique suffers a 2-dB loss in SNR for low to moderate values of transmit power.Index Terms-Convex feasibility problem, distributed beamforming, distributed signal processing, relay networks, semidefinite programming.

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The problem of distributed beamforming is considered for a network which consists of a transmitter, a receiver, and r relay nodes. Assuming that the second order statistics of the channel coefficients are available, we design a distributed beamforming technique via maximization of the receiver signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) subject to individual relay power constraints. We show that using semi-definite relaxation, this SNR maximization can be turned into a convex feasibility semi-definite programming problem, and therefore, it can be efficiently solved using interior point methods. We also obtain a performance bound for the semi-definite relaxation and show that the semi-definite relaxation approach provides a c-approximation to the (nonconvex) SNR maximization problem, where c = O((log r) −1 ) and r is the number of relays.Index Terms-Distributed beamforming, relay networks, semidefinite programming, convex feasibility problem, distributed signal processing.