Trust Degree Based Beamforming for Multi-Antenna Cooperative Communication Systems

In this paper, beamforming design is investigated for a multi-antenna cooperative communication system in which both physical links and social connections (trust degrees) between nodes are taken into account. An optimal beamformer aims to balance between the direct link and the cooperating link as well as respecting the trust degree. The resulting optimization problem is nontrivial to solve, even numerically, as it is not convex. The complexity of the problem is largely reduced by showing that a linear combination of the direct and cooperating links' channel vectors maximizes the achievable rate. Then, a computationally efficient numerical solution is used to maximize the rate. Numerical results demonstrate that significant gains in communication rates can be obtained with the proposed optimal beamforming design.