Joint Zero-Forcing Based Precoder Design for QoS-Aware Power Allocation in MIMO Cooperative Cellular Network

We study a cellular system scenario where multiple data streams originating from a base station (BS) targeted to multiple cell-edge mobile stations (MSs) are transmitted via pre-installed cooperative relay stations (RSs) with multiple antennas. Our objective is to guarantee quality-of-service (QoS) in terms of predefined signal-to-noise ratio at such users within the transmit power budgets at BS and RSs while minimizing total transmit power. We propose a novel precoder design method for power allocation between multiple data streams at BS and RS by using joint zero-forcing strategy in order to avoid multiuser interference (MUI) in the signal received by MSs via both the direct and relay links. We also propose low-complexity suboptimal power allocation algorithm. We focus on analyzing the significance of direct link transmission in providing QoS to cell-edge MSs specially when RS is not situated directly between BS and MSs. Simulation results show that considering direct link and using the proposed scheme in such case significantly improves system outage performance compared to existing schemes in the literature which do not consider direct link.