On achievable sum rates of a multiuser MIMO relay channel

In this paper, we investigate a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) multiuser relay channel, where a source with multiple antennas sends data to multiple users via a relay with multiple antennas. The relay applies linear processing to the received signal and forwards the processed signal to multiple users. In our system model, the direct links from the source to the users are neglected. We propose algorithms to compute achievable sum rates of this system based on dirty paper coding. An achievable sum rate defines a sum rate that can be achieved in the MIMO multiuser relay channel with zero error probability for any user, hence it is also a lower bound of the capacity of this channel. These algorithms also produce coefficients of the precoder at the source node and the coefficients of the linear processing unit at the relay. Simulations show that the proposed system architecture and algorithms achieve sum rate performance that is close to the derived performance upper bound.