Bit Concatenation Based User Relaying in MIMO Broadcast Channels

A novel user relaying scheme based on bit concatenation is proposed for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channels. In a broadcasting phase, a part of information for a destination user is concatenated to data for a relaying user and transmitted to the relaying user. The destination user receives the part of information via the relaying user in a relaying phase in addition to the data in the broadcasting phase. An achievable rate region for the proposed scheme is derived and an algorithm to characterize the boundary of the rate region is proposed. Our analysis shows that the proposed user relaying in a MIMO BC expands the achievable rate region for the zero-forcing dirty paper coding (ZF-DPC) in the MIMO BC without relaying. It is also shown that the proposed user relaying scheme always outperforms a superposition coding (SC) based user relaying scheme. Optimal and suboptimal user pair scheduling algorithms are investigated for a two-user MIMO BC and the proposed suboptimal user pair scheduling scheme is shown to approach the optimal scheduling when the relaying channel gain is large.