  Cooperative communication is an important technology in next generation
wireless networks. Aside from conventional amplify-and-forward (AF) and
decode-and-forward (DF) protocols, the partial decode-and-forward (PDF)
protocol is an alternative relaying scheme that is especially promising for
scenarios in which the relay node cannot reliably decode the complete source
message. However, there are several important issues to be addressed regarding
the application of PDF protocols. In this paper, we propose a PDF protocol and
MIMO precoder designs at the source and relay nodes. The precoder designs are
adapted based on statistical channel state information for correlated MIMO
channels, and matched to practical minimum mean-square-error successive
interference cancelation (MMSE-SIC) receivers at the relay and destination
nodes. We show that under similar system settings, the proposed MIMO precoder
design with PDF protocol and MMSE-SIC receivers achieves substantial
performance enhancement compared with conventional baselines.
