With the objective of improving the spectral efficiency and coverage homogeneity of wireless cellular systems in the downlink, we investigate how to take advantage of two promising transmission technologies envisioned in current standards: network-MIMO and relay stations (RSs). It is assumed that half-duplex RSs are deployed in a cellular system, where the duration of the relay-receive and the relay-transmit phases is fixed beforehand for all cells. In order to reduce the spectral efficiency loses associated to half-duplex relaying, we propose the use of base station (BS) cooperation under a network-MIMO precoding strategy based on block-diagonalization zero-forcing, and optimize radio resources under the convex performance criteria constrained by the per-BS power, modulation and coding schemes and the transmission rate in the relay-transmit phase. By applying convex optimization techniques, the optimal precoding strategy is derived and a suboptimal low complexity solution is also proposed. The obtained solutions are evaluated at system level and compared to other cooperative and non-cooperative BS-based schemes.
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