Joint Multicast Beamforming and Relay Design for Maritime Communication Systems

With growing human maritime activities, supporting low-cost and high-speed information services for users at sea has become imperative. However, traditional means of maritime communications fail to provide high rate services due to their high cost and limited bandwidth. In this paper, considering a base station ashore and several offshore relay nodes, we propose a cooperative multicast communication scheme for maritime users relying on joint beamforming (BF) optimization and relay design. Specifically, we decompose our proposed joint optimization problem into two subproblems, which can be solved by the feasible point pursuit successive convex approximation approach. Furthermore, an alternating optimization algorithm is proposed, which imposes an exponentially increasing complexity as a function of the number of BF elements and the number of relays, when aiming for finding the globally optimal solution. In order to reduce this excessive computational complexity, a low-complexity distributed algorithm is also conceived and its closed-form solution is derived. Finally, the simulation results provided show that our proposed algorithm is beneficial in terms of increasing both the throughput as well as the energy efficiency.