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.
In this paper we study the capacity region of the multi-pair bidirectional (or two-way) wireless relay network, in which a relay node facilitates the communication between multiple pairs of users. This network is a generalization of the well known bidirectional relay channel, where we have only one pair of users. We examine this problem in the context of the deterministic channel interaction model, which eliminates the channel noise and allows us to focus on the interaction between signals. We characterize the capacity region of this network when the relay is operating at either full-duplex mode or half-duplex mode (with non adaptive listen-transmit scheduling). In both cases we show that the cut-set upper bound is tight and, quite interestingly, the capacity region is achieved by a simple equation-forwarding strategy. We study the capacity of the Gaussian two-pair fullduplex directional (or two-way) relay network with a single-relay supporting the communication of the pairs. This network is a generalization of the well known bidirectional relay channel, where we have only one pair of users. We propose a novel transmission technique which is based on a specific superposition of lattice codes and random Gaussian codes at the source nodes. The relay attempts to decode the Gaussian codewords and the superposition of the lattice codewords of each pair. Then it forwards this information to all users. We analyze the achievable rate of this scheme and show that for all channel gains it achieves to within 2 bits sec Hz per user of the cut-set upper bound on the capacity region of the two-pair bidirectional relay network.