Robust transceiver design for AF MIMO relay systems with column correlations

In this paper, we investigate the robust transceiver design for dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) MIMO relay systems with Gaussian distributed channel estimation errors. Aiming at maximizing the mutual information under imperfect channel state information (CSI), source precoder at source and forwarding matrix at the relay are jointly optimized. Using some elegant attributes of matrix-monotone functions, the structures of the optimal solutions are derived first. Then based on the derived structure an iterative waterfilling solution is proposed. Several existing algorithms are shown to be special cases of the proposed solution. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed robust design is demonstrated by simulation results.