  In this paper, linear transceiver design for multi-hop amplify-and-forward
(AF) multiple-input multiple-out (MIMO) relaying systems with Gaussian
distributed channel estimation errors is investigated. Commonly used
transceiver design criteria including weighted mean-square-error (MSE)
minimization, capacity maximization, worst-MSE/MAX-MSE minimization and
weighted sum-rate maximization, are considered and unified into a single
matrix-variate optimization problem. A general robust design algorithm is
proposed to solve the unified problem. Specifically, by exploiting majorization
theory and properties of matrix-variate functions, the optimal structure of the
robust transceiver is derived when either the covariance matrix of channel
estimation errors seen from the transmitter side or the corresponding
covariance matrix seen from the receiver side is proportional to an identity
matrix. Based on the optimal structure, the original transceiver design
problems are reduced to much simpler problems with only scalar variables whose
solutions are readily obtained by iterative water-filling algorithm. A number
of existing transceiver design algorithms are found to be special cases of the
proposed solution. The differences between our work and the existing related
work are also discussed in detail. The performance advantages of the proposed
robust designs are demonstrated by simulation results.
