A low-complexity precoding scheme for the downlink of multi-cell multi-user MIMO AF system

Because of its simplicity, amplify-and-forward (AF) is one of the most popular cooperative relaying technique. Relays are used in cooperative communication to improve reliability, coverage or spectral efficiency of cell-edge users. However, relays tend to increase the interferences seen by users of adjacent cells, particularly by the cell-edge users, when used in multi-cell systems. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity precoding scheme to mitigate the effect of other-cell interference (OCI) in cooperative communication. The scheme is designed by taking into account the interference plus noise covariance matrix of each user for mitigating the interference at each receiver by means of precoding at the relay node. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, both in terms of sum-rate and computational complexity, when compared to other existing OCI-aware precoding algorithms for AF.