The multiway relay channel is a multicast network where L users exchange data through a relay. In this paper, the capacity region of a class of multiway relay channels is derived, where the channel inputs and outputs take values over finite fields. The cut-set upper bound to the capacity region is derived and is shown to be achievable by our proposed functional-decode-forward coding strategy. More specifically, for the general case where the users can transmit at possibly different rates, functional-decode-forward, combined with rate splitting and joint source-channel decoding, is proved to achieve the capacity region; while for the case where all users transmit at a common rate, rate splitting and joint source-channel decoding are not required to achieve the capacity. That the capacity-achieving coding strategies do not utilize the users' received signals in the users' encoding functions implies that feedback does not increase the capacity region of this class of multiway relay channels.
The MWRC has also been studied from the point of view of source coding, where multiple users exchange possibly correlated data via a relay. In the source coding setting, the channel from the users to the relay and that from the relay to the users are assumed to be noiseless. The problem formulation is how many bits the users need to encode their respective messages to be sent to the relay; and after the relay receives these encoded messages, how many bits the relay needs to transmit to the users in order for each user to recover the messages of all other users. The three-user lossless case (where each user perfectly reconstructs the other two users' messages) was studied by Wyner @cite_18 , the two-user lossless case and lossy case (where each user reconstructs the other user's message with a prescribed distortion) was studied by Su and El Gamal @cite_28 , and the two-user lossy case with common reconstructions (where each user must also be able to determine the lossy reconstructed message of the other user) was studied by Timo @cite_12 .
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The multiuser communication channel, in which multiple users exchange information with the help of a relay terminal, termed the multiway relay channel (mRC), is introduced. In this model, multiple interfering clusters of users communicate simultaneously, such that the users within the same cluster wish to exchange messages among themselves, i.e., each user multicasts its message to all the other users in its own cluster. It is assumed that the users cannot receive each other's signals directly. Hence, the relay terminal in this model is the enabler of communication. In particular, restricted encoders are considered, such that the encoding function of each user depends only on its own message and the received signal is used only for decoding the messages of the other users in the cluster. Achievable rate regions and an outer bound are characterized for the Gaussian mRC, and their comparison is presented in terms of the exchange rate, the symmetric rate point in the capacity region in a symmetric Gaussian mRC scenario. It is shown that the compress-and-forward (CF) protocol achieves exchange rates within a constant bit offset of the optimal exchange rate, independent of the power constraints of the terminals in the network. A finite bit gap between the exchange rates achieved by the CF and the amplify-and-forward protocols is also shown. The two special cases of the mRC, the full data exchange model, in which every user wants to receive messages of all other users, and the pairwise data exchange model which consists of multiple two-way relay channels, are investigated in detail. In particular for the pairwise data exchange model, in addition to the proposed random coding-based achievable We derive the capacity of the binary multi-way relay channel, in which multiple users exchange messages at a common rate through a relay. The capacity is achieved using a novel functional-decode-forward coding strategy. In the functional-decode-forward coding strategy, the relay decodes functions of the users' messages without needing to decode individual messages. The functions to be decoded by the relay are defined such that when the relay broadcasts the functions back to the users, every user is able to decode the messages of all other users. The multi-user communication channel, in which multiple users exchange information with the help of a single relay terminal, called the multi-way relay channel, is considered. In this model, multiple interfering clusters of users communicate simultaneously, where the users within the same cluster wish to exchange messages among themselves. It is assumed that the users cannot receive each other's signals directly, and hence the relay terminal is the enabler of communication. A relevant metric to study in this scenario is the symmetric rate achievable by all users, which we identify for amplify-and-forward (AF), decode-and-forward (DF) and compress-and-forward (CF) protocols. We also present an upper bound for comparison. The two extreme cases, namely full data exchange, in which every user wants to receive messages of all other users, and pairwise data exchange, consisting of multiple two-way relay channels, are investigated and presented in detail.