In a bi-directional relay channel, a pair of nodes wish to exc hange independent messages over a shared wireless half-duplex channel with the help of relays. Recent work has mostly considered information theoretic limits of the bi-directional relay channel with t wo terminal nodes (or end users) and one relay. In this work we consider bi-directional relaying with one base station, multiple terminal nodes and one relay, all of which operate in half-duplex modes. We assume that each terminal node communicates with the base-station in a bi-directional fashion through t he relay and do not place any restrictions on the channels between the users, relays and base-stations; t hat is, each node has a direct link with every other node. Our contributions are three-fold: 1) the introd uction of four new temporal protocols which fully exploit the two-way nature of the data and outperform simple routing or multi-hop communication schemes by carefully combining network coding, random binning and user cooperation which exploit over-heard and own-message side information, 2) derivations of inner and outer bounds on the capacity region of the discrete-memoryless multi-pair two-way network, and 3) a numerical evaluation of the obtained achievable rate regions and outer bounds in Gaussian noise which illustrate the performance of the proposed protocols compared to simpler schemes, to each other, to the outer bounds, which highlight the relative gains achieved by network coding, random binning and compress-and-forward-type cooperation between terminal nodes.
Two-way communications were first considered by Shannon himself @cite_14 , in which he introduced inner and outer bounds on the capacity region of the two-way channel where two full-duplex nodes (which may transmit and receive simultaneously) wish to exchanges messages. Since full-duplex operation is, with current technology, of limited practical significance, in this work we assume that the nodes are half-duplex , i.e. at each point in time, a node can either transmit or receive symbols, but not both.
@cite_14
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We consider a three-node network where a relay node establishes a bidirectional communication between the two other nodes using a spectrally efficient decode-and-forward protocol. In the first phase we have the classical multiple-access channel where both nodes transmit a message to the relay node, which then decodes the messages. In the second phase the relay broadcasts a re-encoded composition of them based on the network coding idea. This means that each receiving node uses the same data stream to infer on its intended message. We characterize the optimal transmit strategy for the broadcast phase where either the relay node or the two other nodes are equipped with multiple antennas. Our main result shows that beamforming into the subspace spanned by the channels is always an optimal transmit strategy for the multiple-input single-output bidirectional broadcast channel. Thereby, it shows that correlation between the channels is advantageous. Moreover, this leads to a parametrization of the optimal transmit strategy which specifies the whole capacity region. In retrospect the results are intuitively clear since the single-beam transmit strategy reflects the single stream processing due to the network coding approach.