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

On the Capacity Region of the Deterministic Y-Channel with Common and Private Messages

In multi user Gaussian relay networks, it is desirable to transmit private information to each user as well as common information to all of them. However, the capacity region of such networks with both kinds of information is not easy to characterize. The prior art used simple linear deterministic models in order to approximate the capacities of these Gaussian networks. This paper discusses the capacity region of the deterministic Y-channel with private and common messages. In this channel, each user aims at delivering two private messages to the other two users in addition to a common message directed towards both of them. As there is no direct link between the users, all messages must pass through an intermediate relay. We present outer-bounds on the rate region using genie aided and cut-set bounds. Then, we develop a greedy scheme to define an achievable region and show that at a certain number of levels at the relay, our achievable region coincides with the upper bound. Finally, we argue that these bounds for this setup are not sufficient to characterize the capacity region.Comment: 4 figures, 7 page