Distributed beamforming in multi-cell cooperative MIMO Cellular Networks with non-regenerative relays: An LTE-Advanced framework

In this paper we study a cellular network, in which multiple-antenna users communicate with multiple-antenna base stations (BSs) through fixed infrastructure-based multiple antenna relay stations (RSs). With cooperation among the BSs and linear processing at the RSs, we aim to find the optimal precoding matrices at the users and the beamforming matrices at the RSs that jointly maximize the system sum rate. Unlike for the conventional uplink (without relays), the sum-rate optimization is non-convex. More so, there is cross-coupling of the RSs' channels due to the forwarded interferences by the RSs. Firstly, we incorporate interference pre-cancelation into the RSs' beamforming designs. Secondly, we match each RS's beamforming matrix to the corresponding backward and forward channels such that the end-to-end channel is diagonalizable. Furthermore, we propose an iterative alternating minimization based algorithm to maximize the system sum rate. Finally, we consider two user-RS scheduling/mapping schemes namely the “random” and “channel-aware” schemes. Simulation results show that the channel-aware scheme outperform the random scheme with the performance gap unchanged with increasing number of antennas at the nodes.