Power optimization for maximum channel capacity in MIMO relay system

Introducing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay channel could offer significant capacity gain. And it is of great importance to develop effective power allocation strategies to achieve power efficiency and improve channel capacity in amplify-and-forward relay system. This article investigates a two-hop MIMO relay system with multiple antennas in relay node (RN) and receiver (RX). Maximizing capacity with antenna selection(MCAS) and maximizing capacity with eigen-decomposition (MCED) schemes are proposed to efficiently allocate power among antennas in RN under first and second hop limited scenarios. The analysis and simulation results show that both MCED and MCAS can improve the channel capacity compared with uniform power allocation (UFA) scheme in most of the studied areas. The MCAS bears comparison with MCED with an acceptable capacity loss, but lowers the complexity by saving channel state information (CSI) feedback to the transmitter (TX). Moreover, when the RN is close to RX, the performance of UFA is also close to the upper bound as the performance of first hop is limited.