Achievable Rate Regions for Two-Way Relay Channel using Nested Lattice Coding

This paper studies Gaussian Two-Way Relay Channel where two communication nodes exchange messages with each other via a relay. It is assumed that all nodes operate in half duplex mode without any direct link between the communication nodes. A compress-and-forward relaying strategy using nested lattice codes is first proposed. Then, the proposed scheme is improved by performing a layered coding : a common layer is decoded by both receivers and a refinement layer is recovered only by the receiver which has the best channel conditions. The achievable rates of the new scheme are characterized and are shown to be higher than those provided by the decode-and-forward strategy in some regions.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (October 2013

Lattice Coding for the Two-way Two-relay Channel

Lattice coding techniques may be used to derive achievable rate regions which outperform known independent, identically distributed (i.i.d.) random codes in multi-source relay networks and in particular the two-way relay channel. Gains stem from the ability to decode the sum of codewords (or messages) using lattice codes at higher rates than possible with i.i.d. random codes. Here we develop a novel lattice coding scheme for the Two-way Two-relay Channel: 1 2 3 4, where Node 1 and 4 simultaneously communicate with each other through two relay nodes 2 and 3. Each node only communicates with its neighboring nodes. The key technical contribution is the lattice-based achievability strategy, where each relay is able to remove the noise while decoding the sum of several signals in a Block Markov strategy and then re-encode the signal into another lattice codeword using the so-called "Re-distribution Transform". This allows nodes further down the line to again decode sums of lattice codewords. This transform is central to improving the achievable rates, and ensures that the messages traveling in each of the two directions fully utilize the relay's power, even under asymmetric channel conditions. All decoders are lattice decoders and only a single nested lattice codebook pair is needed. The symmetric rate achieved by the proposed lattice coding scheme is within 0.5 log 3 bit/Hz/s of the symmetric rate capacity.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory on December 3, 201

On Achievable Rate Regions of the Asymmetric AWGN Two-Way Relay Channel

This paper investigates the additive white Gaussian noise two-way relay channel, where two users exchange messages through a relay. Asymmetrical channels are considered where the users can transmit data at different rates and at different power levels. We modify and improve existing coding schemes to obtain three new achievable rate regions. Comparing four downlink-optimal coding schemes, we show that the scheme that gives the best sum-rate performance is (i) complete-decode-forward, when both users transmit at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR); (ii) functional-decode-forward with nested lattice codes, when both users transmit at high SNR; (iii) functional-decode-forward with rate splitting and time-division multiplexing, when one user transmits at low SNR and another user at medium--high SNR.Comment: to be presented at ISIT 201

The Multi-way Relay Channel

The multiuser communication channel, in which multiple users exchange information with the help of a relay terminal, termed the multi-way relay channel (mRC), is introduced. 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 in this model is the enabler of communication. In particular, restricted encoders, which ignore the received channel output and use only the corresponding messages for generating the channel input, are considered. Achievable rate regions and an outer bound are characterized for the Gaussian mRC, and their comparison is presented in terms of exchange rates in a symmetric Gaussian network scenario. It is shown that the compress-and-forward (CF) protocol achieves exchange rates within a constant bit offset of the exchange capacity 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 (AF) 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 schemes, a nested lattice coding based scheme is also presented and is shown to achieve exchange rates within a constant bit gap of the exchange capacity.Comment: Revised version of our submission to the Transactions on Information Theor

Weak Secrecy in the Multi-Way Untrusted Relay Channel with Compute-and-Forward

We investigate the problem of secure communications in a Gaussian multi-way relay channel applying the compute-and-forward scheme using nested lattice codes. All nodes employ half-duplex operation and can exchange confidential messages only via an untrusted relay. The relay is assumed to be honest but curious, i.e., an eavesdropper that conforms to the system rules and applies the intended relaying scheme. We start with the general case of the single-input multiple-output (SIMO) L-user multi-way relay channel and provide an achievable secrecy rate region under a weak secrecy criterion. We show that the securely achievable sum rate is equivalent to the difference between the computation rate and the multiple access channel (MAC) capacity. Particularly, we show that all nodes must encode their messages such that the common computation rate tuple falls outside the MAC capacity region of the relay. We provide results for the single-input single-output (SISO) and the multiple-input single-input (MISO) L-user multi-way relay channel as well as the two-way relay channel. We discuss these results and show the dependency between channel realization and achievable secrecy rate. We further compare our result to available results in the literature for different schemes and show that the proposed scheme operates close to the compute-and-forward rate without secrecy.Comment: submitted to JSAC Special Issue on Fundamental Approaches to Network Coding in Wireless Communication System

Asymmetric Compute-and-Forward with CSIT

We present a modified compute-and-forward scheme which utilizes Channel State Information at the Transmitters (CSIT) in a natural way. The modified scheme allows different users to have different coding rates, and use CSIT to achieve larger rate region. This idea is applicable to all systems which use the compute-and-forward technique and can be arbitrarily better than the regular scheme in some settings.Comment: in International Zurich Seminar on Communications, 2014; minor update on example