Achievable Rate Regions for the Two-way Relay Channel

Abstract

We study the two-way communication problem for the relay channel. Hereby, two terminals communicate simultaneously in both directions with the help of one relay. We consider the restricted two-way problem, i.e., the encoders at both terminals do not cooperate. We provide achievable rate regions for different cooperation strategies, such as decode-and-forward based on block Markov superposition coding. We also evaluate the regions for the special case of additive white Gaussian noise channels. We show that a combined strategy of block Markov superposition coding and Wyner-Ziv coding achieves the cut-set upper bound on the sum-rate of the two-way relay channel when the relay is in the proximity of one of the terminals