A Relay Can Increase Degrees of Freedom in Bursty Interference Networks

We investigate the benefits of relays in multi-user wireless networks with bursty user traffic, where intermittent data traffic restricts the users to bursty transmissions. To this end, we study a two-user bursty MIMO Gaussian interference channel with a relay, where two Bernoulli random states govern the bursty user traffic. We show that an in-band relay can provide a degrees of freedom (DoF) gain in this bursty channel. This beneficial role of in-band relays in the bursty channel is in direct contrast to their role in the non-bursty channel which is not as significant to provide a DoF gain. More importantly, we demonstrate that for certain antenna configurations, an in-band relay can help achieve interference-free performances with increased DoF. We find the benefits particularly substantial with low data traffic, as the DoF gain can grow linearly with the number of antennas at the relay. In this work, we first derive an outer bound from which we obtain a necessary condition for interference-free DoF performances. Then, we develop a novel scheme that exploits information of the bursty traffic states to achieve them.Comment: submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Interference Channels with Bursty Traffic and Delayed Feedback

In this paper we study interference management in wireless networks with bursty user traffic. In each time slot, whether a user is on or off for transmission is governed by its own Bernoulli random state. At each transmitter, the states of activities of other users are only available via feedback. We investigate a canonical two-user bursty Gaussian interference channel (IC) with three different feedback models: (1) no feedback, (2) delayed state feedback, and (3) channel output feedback. In all three cases, we characterize the capacity region of the bursty Gaussian IC to within a bounded gap. It turns out that the near-optimal transmit strategies in the non-bursty IC suffice to establish the approximate characterization of capacity in all three cases. In other words, traffic burstiness does not change the high-SNR optimality of the schemes as long as receivers keep track of user activities. Moreover, the capacity region with delayed state feedback is within a bounded gap to that without feedback, and therefore delayed state feedback does not provide significant improvement at high SNR