The multi-way relay channel

Abstract

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.