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Stockholm 2010
IR–EE–SB 2010:007
1
Abstract—In this article, an overview of advanced convex lack robustness against even small mismatches in the desired
optimization approaches to multi-sensor beamforming is pre- signal steering vector [2]-[3], several authors proposed robust
sented, and connections are drawn between different types of techniques that are based on the concept of worst-case per-
optimization-based beamformers that apply to a broad class of
receive, transmit, and network beamformer design problems. It is formance optimization; see [4]-[11] and references therein.
demonstrated that convex optimization provides an indispensable One distinguishing feature of this line of work is that, using
set of tools for beamforming, enabling rigorous formulation convex optimization theory, seemingly complex robust design
and effective solution of both longstanding and emerging design problems formulated in [4]-[11] have been recast into tractable
problems. convex forms and efficiently solved using interior point algo-
rithms or other appropriate numerical techniques. Beyond the
I. I NTRODUCTION deterministic worst-case robust beamformer designs of [4]-
Beamforming is a versatile and powerful approach to re- [11], there has been a recent trend to alternatively use less
ceive, transmit, or relay signals-of-interest in a spatially selec- conservative probabilistically-constrained designs [12] which
tive way in the presence of interference and noise. Receive employ convex optimization to solve the resulting chance
beamforming is a classic yet continuously developing field programming problems. Moreover, both the worst-case and
that has a rich history of theoretical research and practical probabilistically-constrained beamforming approaches have
applications to radar, sonar, communications, microphone ar- been extended to the case of designing multi-user receivers
ray speech/audio processing, biomedicine, radio astronomy, for space-time coded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
seismology and other areas [1]. In the last decade, there has communication systems [13]-[14].
been renewed interest in beamforming driven by applications Transmit beamforming is a relatively young and dynam-
in wireless communications, where multi-antenna techniques ically developing research field. Classical beamforming is
have emerged as one of the key technologies to accommodate matched to a single steering vector of interest (or, in the case
the explosive growth of the number of users and rapidly of robust beamforming, a “ball” of steering vectors around
increasing demands for new high data-rate services. the “nominal” one) and its goal is to ensure that the inner
Recently, there has been significant progress in the field product of the beamforming weight vector and the steering
of receive beamforming facilitated by convex optimization. vector of interest is large, while the inner product of the
Motivated by the fact that the traditional adaptive beam- beamforming weight vector and all other steering vectors
forming techniques such as minimum variance beamforming is small (to mitigate interference). This paradigm applies to
both receive beamforming and unicast transmit beamforming
A. B. Gershman is the corresponding author. He is with with the
Communication Systems Group, Institute of Telecommunications, Darmstadt towards a single receiver. A related but different case is that of
University of Technology, Merckstr. 25, D-64283 Darmstadt, Germany, e- multi-user transmit beamforming, which arises in the cellular
mail: gershman@nt.tu-darmstadt.de, phone: +49 6151 162813, fax: multi-user downlink when the transmitter is equipped with
+49 6151 162913. N. D. Sidiropoulos is with the Department of Elec-
tronic and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania multiple transmit antennas. In this case, multiple transmit
73100, Greece; e-mail: nikos@telecom.tuc.gr, phone: +30 28210 beamforming weight vectors are used to carry different co-
37227, fax: +30 28210 37542. S. Shahbazpanahi is with the Faculty of channel unicast transmissions, each meant to reach the receiver
Engineering and Applied Science, University of Ontario Institute of Tech-
nology, 2000 Simcoe Street North, Oshawa, Ontario, L1H 7K4, Canada; of one user. These vectors are then jointly designed to balance
e-mail: shahram.shahbazpanahi@uoit.ca, phone: +1 905 7213111 the interference between different transmissions. The weight
(ext. 2842), fax: +1 905 7213370. M. Bengtsson and B. Ottersten are with vector designed for a given user should have a large inner
the School of Electrical Engineering, Royal Institute of Technology, SE-
10044 Stockholm, Sweden; e-mails: mats.bengtsson@ee.kth.se and product with the steering vector of this user, and small
bjorn.ottersten@ee.kth.se, phone +46 8790 8463, fax: +46 8790 inner products with the steering vectors of all other users.
7260. B. Ottersten is also with securityandtrust.lu at the University of Luxem- This concept was pioneered in [15]-[16] where several early
bourg. The work of A. B. Gershman was supported in parts by the European
Research Council (ERC) Advanced Investigator Grants program under Grant downlink beamforming techniques have been developed in the
227477-ROSE and German Research Foundation (DFG) under Grant GE context of voice services in a cellular mobile radio network
1881/4-1. The work of S. Shahbazpanahi was supported by the National where, from the operator’s perspective, the system should
Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under the
Discovery Grants program. The work of N. D. Sidiropoulos was supported provide an acceptable quality-of-service (QoS) to each user
by ARL-ERO contract W911NF-09-1-0004. The work of M. Bengtsson was and serve as many users as possible, while radiating as low
supported by the Swedish Research Council (VR). The work of B. Ottersten power as possible. An important step forward followed in [17],
has received funding from the European Research Council under the European
Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant where convex optimization methods were used to solve the
agreement no 228044. problems of [15]-[16] and their robust worst-case optimization
2
based extensions. As the robust designs of [17] are based techniques have been extensively used in these works to obtain
on several approximations and can be shown to be overly- computationally attractive (exact or approximate) solutions to
conservative, recent follow-up work has pursued less conser- originally difficult design problems.
vative robust designs based on convex optimization [18]-[19]. The main goal of this paper is to present a system-
To provide more flexibility than that of worst-case designs, atic overview of the current state of the art of advanced
outage probability-constrained downlink beamformers based optimization-based beamforming, and to explore interrela-
on chance programming have also been recently developed tionships between different types of beamformers that apply
[20], [21], [22]. to a broad class of practically important receive, transmit,
What if we wish to transmit common information to many and network beamforming problems. While the focus of this
users? The traditional way of doing this is (semi-) blind, in the article is on applications in wireless communications, several
sense that it assumes little if anything regarding the steering designs considered here are also applicable in quite different
vectors or even the spatial distribution of users listening to application contexts, such as MIMO radar.
the transmission at any given time. In traditional radio and The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Sec-
TV broadcasting, for example, the signal is emitted either tions II, III and IV are devoted to the receive, transmit, and
isotropically or with a fixed beampattern to cover a service network beamforming problems, respectively. In Section V,
area. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that conclusions are drawn and future research directions are
analog receivers were passive devices incapable of provid- briefly discussed.
ing feedback to the transmitting station. In modern digital Notation: Uppercase and lowercase bold letters denote
wireless networks, particularly those based on subscription or matrices and vectors, respectively. E{·}, Tr(·), (·)T , and (·)H
offering location-aware services, we often have some level stand for the statistical expectation, trace of a matrix, trans-
of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. This pose, and Hermitian transpose, respectively. I is the identity
can be exploited to boost network reach, coverage, quality of matrix. k · k denotes the Euclidean norm of a vector or the
service, and spectral efficiency; and minimize interference to Frobenius norm of a matrix. ⊙ denotes the Schur-Hadamard
other systems (thus facilitating co-habitation, as in cognitive (element-wise) matrix or vector product, diag(a) stands for
radio). This is the premise of a recent line of work (starting a diagonal matrix whose diagonal entries are the elements of
with [23] and [24]) on multicast beamforming using convex vector a, and λmax (·) stands for the principal eigenvalue of a
optimization tools. Multicast beamforming is now part of matrix.
the current UMTS-LTE / EMBMS draft for next-generation
cellular wireless services [25], [26]. Similar ideas are currently
II. R ECEIVE B EAMFORMING
making their way through fixed wireless and local distribution
standardization committees, and are likely to influence media The output signal of a narrowband receive beamformer can
distribution to wireless hand-held devices. be written as
Information-theoretic analysis of the relay channel [39] and x(t) = wH y(t)
multiple-relay networks [40] has paved the way for more
practical network cooperation schemes. Network beamforming where w is the N × 1 vector of beamformer complex weight
is a rapidly emerging area that belongs to the general field of coefficients, y(t) is the N ×1 complex snapshot vector of array
cooperative communications [27]. The key idea of network observations, and N is the number of antenna array sensors.
beamforming is to use a “virtual array” of relay nodes that The array observation vector can be modeled as
retransmit properly weighted signals from the source to the y(t) = s(t) + n(t)
destination [28], thereby exploiting cooperation diversity. In
the simplest setting, a distributed network beamformer uses where s(t) and n(t) are the desired signal and the interference-
an adaptive complex-valued weighting of the received signal, plus-noise components of y(t), respectively. In the point signal
similar to the so-called amplify-and-forward protocol. More source case, s(t) = s(t)as where s(t) and as are the desired
advanced types of relay processing (e.g., based on the decode- signal waveform and its steering vector (spatial signature),
and-forward strategy) are also possible. An interesting fea- respectively.
ture of network beamforming is that it can be interpreted If as and the true array covariance matrix R ,
as a certain combination of receive and transmit strategies. E{y(t)yH (t)} are perfectly known, then the optimal weight
However, the main difference between the concept of network vector can be straightforwardly obtained by means of maxi-
beamforming and the more traditional concepts of receive and mizing the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) [1],
transmit beamforming is that the relays can hardly exchange see Fig. 1. In the finite sample case, the true array covari-
information about their received signals, so that beamforming ance matrix
PJis unavailable and, therefore, its sample estimate
is performed in a distributed fashion. There has been a R̂ = J1 t=1 y(t)yH (t) = J1 YY H is used instead of R
rapidly growing activity in this area over the last two years. where Y , [y(1), . . . , y(J)] is the beamformer training data
Following [28], a number of new concepts and methods have matrix and J is the number of snapshots available. Then,
been proposed, see [29]-[38] and references therein. These the optimal weight vector can be approximately computed by
include multi-user and bi-directional extensions of the original solving the following convex problem [1]-[3]
approach of [28] and new beamforming strategies such as a
filter-and-forward approach [33], [34]. Convex optimization min wH R̂w s.t. wH as = 1. (1)
w
3
Fig. 1. Illustration of receive adaptive beamforming: Polar plot of adapted min wH R̂w s.t. |wH (as + δ)| ≥ 1 ∀ kδk ≤ ε. (3)
beampattern. The beamformer output SINR is maximized by means of w
enhancing the desired signal by the beampattern mainlobe and rejecting the
interferers by beampattern nulls.
Another useful extension of the approach of [4] and [7] Interpretation: in a long sequence of “trials” (i.i.d. draws of δ), acceptable
performance is guaranteed in p × 100% of cases; signal outage happens with
has been developed in [12]. The authors of [12] argue that, probability (at the rate of) less than 1 − p.
although the worst-case beamformer designs are known to • Expectation-based design:
result in quite robust techniques, they might be overly con- H H
min w R̂w s.t. E{|w (as + δ)|} ≥ t
w
servative because the actual worst operational conditions may
occur in practice with a very low (or even zero) probability. The latter only requires knowledge of the second-order statistics (instead of
the distribution) of h := as + δ, which is convenient. The flip side is that this
This motivated the authors of [12] to develop an alternative formulation offers no outage performance guarantee in general. For this reason,
approach to robust beamforming that provides the robustness expectation-based design is the “last resort” way of dealing with uncertainty.
where δ is assumed to be a random mismatch vector drawn station equipped with N antennas, transmitting individual
from some known distribution, Pr{·} is the probability oper- narrowband data streams to a set of M users, each having a
ator whose explicit form can be obtained from the statistical single antenna. Note that all results in this section generalize
assumptions on the steering vector errors, and p is some pre- 1 The worst-case distribution (for given covariance) of the mismatch vec-
selected probability threshold. In contrast to the deterministic tor turns out to be discrete. This result entails an intermediate restriction
constraint used in (3) (that requires the distortionless response (strengthening) of the outage constraint, see [12] for details.
5
There are at least three possible interpretations of this non-zero in a sub-vector corresponding to one of the base
semidefinite relaxation stations. One proof is based on the simple observation that
the corresponding optimal matrices Wk in the semidefinite
• With the rank constraints rank(Wk ) = 1, (15) is com-
reformulation will be both block-diagonal and rank-one, which
pletely equivalent to (14). This problem can become a
is only possible if only one of the blocks is non-zero. An
relaxed version of (14) only when the matrices Wk are
alternative is to exploit the virtual uplink formulation and
allowed to have any rank.
use general results from the theory of standard interference
• It can be shown that the semidefinite relaxation of (15)
functions [49]. Algorithmically, this conceptual idea can be
is the Lagrange dual of the Lagrange dual of (14).
implemented with a computational complexity that is only
• If we allow the beamforming vectors to be randomly
K times larger than in the case with a given base station
time-varying with covariance matrix Wk = E[wk wkH ],
assignment, where K is the number of base stations.
the optimal choice of Wk is given by the semidefinite
relaxation of (15). One possible practical implementation Connection between Lagrange duality and virtual uplink. Introducing the
of such a scheme is to use a space-time code with the dual variables qk for the constraints in (14), the Lagrangian can be written as
corresponding transmit covariance matrix. M M
M
H Rk
X 2
X X H 2
L(wk , qk ) = kwm k − qk wk
wk − wl Rk wl − σk
For general non-convex quadratic programs, semidefinite re- m=1 k=1
γk l6=k
laxation can only be used to obtain a lower bound on the and minimizing with respect to wk results in the dual problem
optimal objective function and possibly determine an ap- M M
X qk Rk X
proximate solution to the original problem, such as in the max qk σk
2
s.t. I − + qn Rn º 0, ∀ k = 1, . . . , M. (16)
{qk } γk
multicast beamforming problem described below. However, k=1 n6=k
in the specific case of (15) with dropped rank constraints, From the definition of positive definiteness, the constraints holds if and only if
P qk Rk
it turns out that the ostensible relaxation is not a relaxation, uH ( M n6=k qn Rn + I − γk )u ≥ 0 for all vectors u, i.e. (16) can be written
as
i.e., the “relaxed” problem is exactly equivalent to the original M
X uHk qk Rk uk
problem. In other words, it can be shown that the solution max
2
qk σk s.t. max PM ≤ γk , ∀ k = 1, . . . , M.
{qk } uk uH
k (
n6=k qn Rn + I)uk
to (15) with dropped rank constraints always yields rank- k=1
(17)
one matrices Wk , which directly provides the solution to For a given fixed set of uk , it is easy to see that the optimal qk is the unique
set of values where all constraints are fulfilled with equality. In particular, this
(14) using Wk = wk wkH . In optimization terminology, this equivalence must hold for the uk that maximize each constraint, so the solution
result shows that strong duality holds for problem (14), i.e., to (17) is given by the fixed point of
that the dual of (14) has the same optimal objective as the uH
k qk Rk uk
max PM = γk , ∀ k = 1, . . . , M. (18)
primal problem. This result is not so surprising, considering uk uH
k ( n6=k qn Rn + I)uk
that there are also several other algorithms available to solve The so-called virtual uplink problem associated with (14) is given by
problem (14), see [15], [48]. These algorithms are not based M
X uH k qk Rk uk
on the convex reformulation of (15) but rather on rewriting min
2
qk σk s.t. PM ≥ γk , ∀ k = 1, . . . , M
{qk ,uk } uH
k (
n6=k qn Rn + I)uk
the problem into an equivalent virtual uplink problem, that k=1
(19)
can be solved using fixed point iterations [49]. See the special where qk and uk can be interpreted as transmit powers and receive beamform-
ers, respectively, in this virtual uplink beamforming problem. A similar argument
insert on the connection between Lagrange duality and virtual shows that the optimum is given by the fixed point of (18). From the so-called
uplink. From practical experience, the algorithm in [48] is complementarity conditions, it can be seen that the optimal uk will only differ
from the optimal wk in (14) by a scaling. From standard convexity theory [52],
preferable compared to the semidefinite reformulation in terms the dual of (16), i.e., (15) with dropped rank constraints has the same optimal
of computational speed, at least so long as (15) with dropped objective as (16), which means that the proofs in [17] and [48] that (19) and (14)
are equivalent also show the equivalence to (15) with dropped rank constraints.
rank constraints is solved using general purpose SDP software See also [54] for further discussions on these connections.
PM
like [42]. Note that replacing the objective function in (19) by k=1 qk will not affect
the optimal uk . It is common to first normalize all channels corresponding to
Further modifications and extensions: Several modifica- 2
σk = 1 to get a more esthetic formulation of the virtual uplink problem (19).
tions and extensions have been proposed to the SINR bal-
ancing problem (14). For multi-cell scenarios, the problem An alternative to the SINR balancing formulation is to
can be extended to not only find the jointly optimal set consider the converse problem, namely to maximize the SINR
of transmit beamformers, but also to determine to which of each user subject to a constraint on the available transmit
base station each user should be assigned to. Surprisingly power. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, there is no convex
enough, this mixed combinatorial and non-convex quadratic formulation of the resulting optimization problem, which
problem can be solved easily, see [50], [51]. The trick is however can still be solved very efficiently using the virtual
to conceptually view all the base stations as a single virtual uplink formulation and a fixed-point iteration, see [48]. An
base station that jointly transmits to all users, and solve the alternative solution using quasi-convexity is described in [53].
corresponding beamforming problem. By making the channel An advantage of the semidefinite relaxation technique is
covariance matrices for the virtual base station block-diagonal, that it is very easy to add more constraints to the problem
the solution will not benefit from using coherent transmission formulation. For example, the transmit power of the individual
from several base stations (in contrast to so-called coherent antenna elements can be constrained, see [17]. As long as
coordinated multi-point transmission schemes that recently the corresponding constraints on the matrices Wk are linear
have been proposed for use in IMT-advanced), and it can (or convex), the problem can be solved efficiently. However,
be shown that the optimal beamforming vectors will only be there are in general no guarantees that strong duality holds
7
Dropping the tilde sign for brevity yields the following QoS −5
formulation: −4
feasible
2 H 2
min kwk s.t. |w hm | ≥ 1 ∀ m = 1, . . . , M. (21) −3
w
−2
infeasible
Note that this formulation has a certain similarity to (12) as −1
Relay 1
covariance [24], [59] (cf. first-principles definition of multicast
capacity, using Tr(XRm ) = Tr(Xhm hH H
m ) = hm Xhm , and
monotonicity of log(·)). Relay 2
g1
Destination
g2
f1
g3
Once the relaxed problem is solved, the only direct claim f2
Relay 3
one can make is that the resulting objective topt is no less than f3
transmission. Moreover, network beamforming is distributed (29), the following key observation [52] has been used in [29].
as each relay node knows only its own received signal, and If, for some given SNR value t, the convex feasibility problem
does not know the signals received by the other relay nodes.
find X
The signal received by the destination is given by
s.t. tr (X(R − tQ)) ≥ σn2 t, (30)
r
X Xii ≤ Pi /Dii ∀ i = 1, . . . , N ; X º 0
z= gi yi + n (26)
i=1 is feasible, then tmax ≥ t. Conversely, if (30) is not feasible,
then tmax < t. Based on this observation, one can check
where n is the receiver noise whose variance σn2 is known.
whether the optimal value tmax of the quasiconvex problem
Using (24) and (25), we can rewrite (26) as
(29) is smaller or greater than any given value t. In [29], it has
p X r r
X been proposed to use a simple bisection algorithm for solving
z = P0 wi fi gi s + wi gi νi + n . (27) (29), where (30) has to be solved at each step of this algorithm.
|
i=1
{z } |
i=1
{z } Let us start with some preselected interval [tl tu ] which is
signal component total noise, nT known to contain the optimal value tmax , the problem (30) is
then solved at the midpoint t = (tl + tu )/2. If (30) is feasible
To optimally calculate the relay weight coefficients, the des- for this value of t, then tl = t is set; otherwise tu = t is chosen.
tination SNR has to be maximized subject to some power This procedure is repeated until the difference between tu and
constraints. To illustrate the application of convex optimization tl is smaller than some preselected threshold δ.
to this problem, let us consider the individual relay power Numerical examples in [29] have shown that, similar to the
constraints. Then, the following optimization problem has to case of downlink beamforming, the so-obtained solution Xopt
be solved: is always rank-one and, therefore, no randomization is needed
to obtain the beamforming weight vector. However, no proof
max SNR s.t. Pi ≤ Pi ∀ i = 1, . . . , N (28) of this empirical observation is available in [29].
w
Summary of network beamforming algorithm.
where Pi and Pi are, respectively, the actual and maximum Step 1: Properly set the initial values of tl and tu .
allowable transmit powers of the ith relay. As in (14), we Step 2: Set t := (tl + tu )/2 and solve (30).
Step 3: If (30) is feasible, then tl := t; otherwise tu := t.
use the ratio of expected signal power to expected noise Step 4: If tu − tl < δ, then go to Step 5; otherwise go to Step 2.
power as a measure of SNR. In [29], it has been shown Step 5: Find the weight vector from the principal eigenvector of the resulting
H matrix Xopt .
2
that this is given by σ2w+wRw H Qw and Pi = Dii |wi | where
n
w , [w1 , . . . , wN ] , f , [f1 , . . . , fN ] , g , [g1 , . . . , gN ]T ,
T T One suitable choice of the initial values of tl and tu is
Q , σ¡ν2 E{ggH }, R , P0 E{(f¢ ⊙ g)(f ⊙ g)H }, D , 0 and SNRmax (Pmax ), respectively, where SNRmax (Pmax )
P0 diag [E{|f1 |2 }, . . . , E{|fN |2 }] + σν2 I, and Dii is the ith is the maximumP achievable SNR under the total relay power
N
diagonal entry of D. budget Pmax = i=1 Pi . It has been shown in [29] that
Hence, the problem in (28) can be rewritten as SNRmax (Pmax ) = Pmax λmax (G) (31)
wH Rw where G , (σn2 I + Pmax D−1/2 QD−1/2 )−1 D−1/2 RD−1/2 .
max s.t. Dii |wi |2 ≤ Pi ∀ i = 1, . . . , N. The results of [28] and [29] are applicable only when the
w σn2 + wH Qw
relays are fully synchronized at the symbol level and when the
Defining X , wwH , this optimization problem can be source-to-relay and relay-to-destination channels are frequency
rewritten as flat. When these channels are frequency selective or the time
Tr(RX) synchronization between the relays is poor, the signal replicas
max passed through different relays and/or channel paths will arrive
X σn2
+ Tr(QX)
to the destination node with different delays. This will result
s.t. Dii Xii ≤ Pi ∀ i = 1, . . . , N ; rank(X) = 1, X º 0
in inter-symbol-interference (ISI).
where Xii is the ith diagonal entry of X. Following the idea of To combat such ISI, two different approaches have been
semidefinite relaxation and dropping the non-convex rank-one presented in the literature. In [33]-[34], a filter-and-forward
constraint, the latter problem can be relaxed as protocol has been introduced for frequency selective relay
networks, and several related network beamforming techniques
max t have been developed. In these techniques, the relays deploy
X,t finite impulse response (FIR) filters to compensate for the
s.t. Tr (X(R − tQ)) ≥ σn2 t, (29) effect of source-to-relay and relay-to-destination channels; that
Xii ≤ Pi /Dii ∀ i = 1, . . . , N ; X º 0. is, the burden of mitigating ISI is put on the shoulders of
the relay nodes. One of these techniques can be viewed as
Note that, for any fixed value of t the set of feasible X in (29) an extension of (29) because it is based on maximizing the
is convex; it follows that the optimization problem in (29) is destination QoS (measured in terms of SINR) subject to the
quasiconvex. individual relay power constraints. The latter technique is
Solving (29), one can obtain the maximum achievable SNR also based on a combination of bisection search and convex
(which is the maximum value of t, denoted as tmax ). To solve feasibility problem-solving.
11
Another beamforming approach developed in [35] for asyn- tical communications engineering aspects, such as synchro-
chronous but flat-fading relay networks, suggests the relay nization, modulation, and coding; and real-time beamformer
processing to be simple (i.e., to follow the amplify-and- weight optimization to account for time-selective fading and
forward protocol), while the source and destination nodes carry other sources of temporal variation in the operational envi-
the main burden of mitigating ISI. Viewing an asynchronous ronment. Robustness issues will likely remain high in the
flat-fading relay network as an artificial multipath channel research agenda, in light of erroneous / delayed / quan-
(where each channel path corresponds to one particular relay), tized CSI encountered in practical systems. This is especially
the authors of [35] use the orthogonal frequency division true for network beamforming which is still in its infancy.
multiplexing (OFDM) scheme at the source and destination Computationally efficient implementations of beamforming
nodes to deal with this artificial multipath channel. techniques are critical for applications of beamforming in
Convex optimization has also found its application to practical systems, and it can be foreseen that this field will
multi-user (i.e., multiple-source, multiple-destination) network keep benefiting from advances in convex optimization theory -
beamforming techniques. In [30], a network of relays is used to including relevant work towards real-time convex optimization
establish communication between multiple source destination [69].
pairs. The relays amplify and phase adjust the signal they
receive from all transmitting sources by multiplying it with R EFERENCES
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AEU – Int. J. Electronics and Communications, vol. 53, pp. 305-314,
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a convex SDP problem. In light of the results of [68], when [4] S. Vorobyov, A. B. Gershman, and Z.-Q. Luo, “Robust adaptive
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13
[68] Y. Huang and S. Zhang, “Complex matrix decomposition and quadratic Best Paper Award in 1993, 2001, and 2006. Dr. Ottersten is
programming,” Mathematics of Operation Research, vol. 32, pp. 758– currently Editor-in-Chief of EURASIP S IGNAL P ROCESSING
768, Aug. 2007.
[69] J. Mattingley, S. Boyd, “Real-Time Convex Optimization in Signal J OURNAL. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and EURASIP.
Processing,” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, this issue.
Alex B. Gershman received his Diploma and Ph.D. degrees
in Radiophysics and Electronics from the Nizhny Novgorod
State University, Russia, in 1984 and 1990, respectively. Since
2005, he is a Professor at Darmstadt University of Technology,
Germany. He has co-authored papers that received two IEEE
Signal Processing Society (SPS) Best Paper Awards in 2004
and 2005, and the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems
Society (AESS) Barry Carlton Award in 2006. Prof. Gershman
served as Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE S IGNAL P ROCESSING
L ETTERS (2006–2008), and as Chair of the Sensor Array and
Multichannel Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE
SPS (2007–2008). He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Nicholas D. Sidiropoulos graduated from the Aristotelian
University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and received his Ph.D.
in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, in
1992. He was Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia,
and Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota. Since
2002, he is a Professor at the Technical University of Crete
– Greece. He received the IEEE Signal Processing Society
(SPS) Best Paper Award in 2001 and 2007, has served as SPS
Distinguished Lecturer (2008-2009), and as Chair of the Signal
Processing for Communications and Networking Technical
Committee of the IEEE SPS. Prof. Sidiropoulos is a Fellow
of IEEE.
Shahram Shahbazpanahi received his B.S., M.S., and PhD.
degrees all in Electrical Engineering, from Sharif University of
Technology, Tehran, Iran 1992, 1994, and 2001, respectively.
Since 2005, he is an Assistant Professor at the University of
Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. He
serves as Associate Editor for both the IEEE T RANSACTIONS
ON S IGNAL P ROCESSING and the IEEE S IGNAL P ROCESS -
ING L ETTERS. He is a member of the Sensor Array and
Multichannel Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE
Signal Processing Society.
Mats Bengtsson received the M.S. degree Linköping Univer-
sity, Linköping, Sweden, in 1991 and the Ph.D. degrees from
the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden,
in 2000. From 1991 to 1995, he was with Ericsson Telecom
AB Karlstad. He currently holds a position as Associate
Professor in the Signal Processing Laboratory of the School of
Electrical Engineering at KTH. He serves as Associate Editor
for the IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON S IGNAL P ROCESSING.
Björn Ottersten received the M.S. degree from Linköping
University, Linköping, Sweden, in 1986 and his Ph.D. in
1989 from Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Since 1991 he
is a Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH),
Stockholm. From 2004 to 2008 he was dean of the School of
Electrical Engineering at KTH and from 1992 to 2004 he was
head of the department for Signals, Sensors, and Systems at
KTH. Dr. Ottersten is also Director of securityandtrust.lu at
the University of Luxembourg since 2009. He has co-authored
papers that received the IEEE Signal Processing Society