In this paper, an overhearing protocol is proposed for two-way cooperative multi-antenna relaying systems, where the relays equipped with multiple antennas collaborate to relay signals between the base station (BS) and two user equipments (UEs). In the proposed overhearing protocol, the UE in the uplink transmission phase transmits only in the first time slot, i.e., it remains silent in the second time slot, whereas the previous overhearing protocol assumes the UE transmitting also in the second time slot. Therefore, the proposed overhearing protocol is more power-efficient. The precoding matrix at each cooperative relay is optimized in the sense of minimizing the weighted mean squared error (WMSE). Simulation results show that the proposed scheme shows not only lower MSE but also higher achievable sum-rate than existing cooperative relaying schemes.Index Terms-Overhearing, multi-antenna relay, cooperative relays, asymmetric multi-user channel
I. INTRODUCTIONTwo-way relaying [1], [2] improves the spectral efficiency of the one-way relaying protocol [3], [4] by employing twoway relays which simultaneously receive from or transmit to both of the base station (BS) and user equipment (UE). Our focus is amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying which is more preferable in practical systems, compared to decodeand-forward (DF) or compress-and-forward relaying, due to its easier implementation [5], [6]. It is observed from the conventional two-way relaying protocol that the terminal as the transmitter in one directional transmission must be the same terminal as the receiver in another directional transmission. Nevertheless, this strict requirement is typically not satisfied in many cellular communication scenarios, which constrains the applications of the two-way conventional relaying protocol in many practical systems. For example, one user has the uplink traffic yet another user has the downlink traffic, indicating