Joint optimization of source and relay precoding for AF MIMO relay systems

In this paper, we investigate a joint source and relay precoding design scheme for an amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay system with absence of the direct link. The joint optimization problem, which is to minimize an objective function based on the mean square error (MSE), is formulated as a nonconvex optimization problem in the AF MIMO relay system. Instead of the conventional iterative method, we use an inequality to derive a lower bound of the MSE under the power constraint for obtaining a suboptimal solution of the objective function, which makes the optimization problem convex and also approaches the existing upper bound of the MSE, especially at the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Numerical results show that this scheme outperforms the previous schemes in terms of either MSE or bit error rate (BER).