A comparison of TDMA, dirty paper coding, and beamforming for multiuser MIMO relay networks

A two-hop multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay network which comprises a multiple antenna source, an amplify-and-forward MIMO relay and many potential users are studied in this paper. Consider the achievable sum rate as the performance metric, a joint design method for the processing units of the BS and relay node is proposed. The optimal structures are given, which decompose the multiuser MIMO relay channel into several parallel single-input single-output relay channels. With these structures, the signal-to-noise ratio at the destination users is derived; and the power allocation is proved to be a convex problem. We also show that high sum rate can be achieved by pairing each link according to its magnitude. The sum rate of three broadcast strategies, time division multiple access (TDMA) to the strongest user, dirty paper coding (DPC), and beamforming (BF) are investigated. The sum rate bounds of these strategies and the sum capacity (achieved by DPC) gain over TDMA and BF are given. With these results, it can be easily obtained that how far away TDMA and BF are from being optimal in terms of the achievable sum rate.