MIMO Multiway Relaying with Pairwise Data Exchange: A Degrees of Freedom Perspective

In this paper, we study achievable degrees of freedom (DoF) of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiway relay channel (mRC) where $K$ users, each equipped with $M$ antennas, exchange messages in a pairwise manner via a common $N$-antenna relay node. % A novel and systematic way of joint beamforming design at the users and at the relay is proposed to align signals for efficient implementation of physical-layer network coding (PNC). It is shown that, when the user number $K=3$, the proposed beamforming design can achieve the DoF capacity of the considered mRC for any $(M,N)$ setups. % For the scenarios with $K>3$, we show that the proposed signaling scheme can be improved by disabling a portion of relay antennas so as to align signals more efficiently. Our analysis reveals that the obtained achievable DoF is always piecewise linear, and is bounded either by the number of user antennas $M$ or by the number of relay antennas $N$. Further, we show that the DoF capacity can be achieved for $\frac{M}{N} \in \left(0,\frac{K-1}{K(K-2)} \right]$ and $\frac{M}{N} \in \left[\frac{1}{K(K-1)}+\frac{1}{2},\infty \right)$, which provides a broader range of the DoF capacity than the existing results. Asymptotic DoF as $K\rightarrow \infty$ is also derived based on the proposed signaling scheme.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Generalized Signal Alignment For MIMO Two-Way X Relay Channels

We study the degrees of freedom (DoF) of MIMO two-way X relay channels. Previous work studied the case $N < 2M$, where $N$ and $M$ denote the number of antennas at the relay and each source, respectively, and showed that the maximum DoF of $2N$ is achievable when $N \leq \lfloor\frac{8M}{5}\rfloor$ by applying signal alignment (SA) for network coding and interference cancelation. This work considers the case $N>2M$ where the performance is limited by the number of antennas at each source node and conventional SA is not feasible. We propose a \textit{generalized signal alignment} (GSA) based transmission scheme. The key is to let the signals to be exchanged between every source node align in a transformed subspace, rather than the direct subspace, at the relay so as to form network-coded signals. This is realized by jointly designing the precoding matrices at all source nodes and the processing matrix at the relay. Moreover, the aligned subspaces are orthogonal to each other. By applying the GSA, we show that the DoF upper bound $4M$ is achievable when $M \leq \lfloor\frac{2N}{5}\rfloor$ ($M$ is even) or $M \leq \lfloor\frac{2N-1}{5}\rfloor$ ($M$ is odd). Numerical results also demonstrate that our proposed transmission scheme is feasible and effective.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, to appear in IEEE ICC 201