On the user performance of orthogonal projection signal alignment scheme in MIMO relay systems

AbstractIn this article, an orthogonal projection signal alignment (OP-SI) scheme is proposed for multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) relay systems, and the user performance is studied with and without perfect channel state information (CSI). Particularly we focus on an important scenario in cellular systems, where the base station exchanges messages with multiple users via a relay. By jointly designing the precoding matrices at the base station and the relay, information exchanging can be accomplished within two time slots. When the perfect CSI is available, closed form expressions of ergodic sum rate are developed for the proposed scheme, where we can demonstrate that the proposed scheme yields a better performance than the existing zero-forcing signal alignment scheme. When the channel estimation is not perfect, both the intra-stream and inter-stream interference cannot be completely removed. To evaluate the impact of channel estimation error, an approximation of ergodic sum rate for the OP-SI scheme is developed to show that the system performance could significantly decrease as the covariance of channel estimation error increases. Moreover, the outage capacity is also analyzed. Furthermore, an enhanced relay precoding scheme is also introduced to improve the transmission performance. Numerical results are provided to show the accuracy of the developed analytical results.