Joint source/relay precoders design in amplify-and-forward relay systems: A geometric mean decomposition approach

Existing precoder designs for an amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative system often assume a linear receiver at the destination, and a precoder at the relay. The performance enhancement of such a system is then limited. In this paper, we consider a nonlinear successive interference cancellation (SIC) receiver, and at the same time take the source precoder into consideration. Using the geometric mean decomposition (GMD), we propose a joint source/relay precoders design method, fully exploring information provided by direct and relay links. With our method, the design problem can be transformed to a standard scalar concave optimization problem, and a closed-form solution can be obtained. Simulations show that the proposed design can significantly enhance the performance of a MIMO AF cooperative system.