Cooperative Joint Precoding in a Downlink Cellular System with Shared Relay: Design and Performance Evaluation

In this paper, we investigate a relay enhanced cellular system, where a relay station is located in the overlap area served by two base stations. We propose cooperative joint precoding schemes for the downlink transmission of such relay enhanced cellular system to maximize the system capacity while minimizing the interference at both the relay station and the mobile stations. We formulate the optimization problems to maximize the system capacity and design the multiuser precoding vectors at each base station and the relay station. We quantify the ergodic rate performance of the proposed multiuser precoding schemes through statistical analysis. The extensively derived ergodic expressions will facilitate the accurate performance evaluation of the proposed transmission schemes. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes can effectively cancel the interference and improve the sum rate and the outage performance for cell edge users.