Joint MMSE precoding design in multi-hop bi-directional MIMO relay systems

This paper investigates the problem of joint design of relay precoders and receivers based on the minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) criterion in multi-hop bi-directional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) amplify-and-forward (AF) relay systems. In contrast to the conventional research on two-way relay systems, we combine a multi-hop relay system with a bi-directional relay system which further enhances the system performance. By decoupling the original highly non-convex problem into three sub-problems, we propose an iterative algorithm to alternatively optimize relay precoders and receivers. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed iterative algorithm outperforms other algorithms in terms of bit-error-rate (BER).