Joint Power Control and Blind Beamforming over Wireless Networks: A Cross Layer Approach

Traditional joint power control and beamforming achieve the targeted signal-to-interference-noise ratio (SINR) at the receivers by assuming the knowledge of the measurements of channel parameters and SINR. Blind beamforming is an effective technique for beamforming and channel estimation without the need of training sequences, thus not consuming extra bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a novel joint power control and blind beamforming algorithm that reformulates the power control problem in such a way that it does not need any prior knowledge and additional measurements in the physical layer. In contrast to the traditional schemes that optimize SINR and, as a result, minimize bit error rate (BER), our proposed algorithm achieves the desired BER by adjusting a quantity available from blind beamforming. By sending this quantity to the transmitter through a feedback channel, the transmit power is iteratively updated in a distributed manner in the wireless networks with cochannel interferences (CCIS). Our proposed algorithm is more robust to estimation errors. We have shown in both analysis and simulation that our algorithm converges to the desired solution. In addition, a Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRB) is derived to compare with the performance of our proposed joint power control and blind beamforming system.