On Two-Pair Two-Way Relay Channel with an Intermittently Available Relay

When multiple users share the same resource for physical layer cooperation such as relay terminals in their vicinities, this shared resource may not be always available for every user, and it is critical for transmitting terminals to know whether other users have access to that common resource in order to better utilize it. Failing to learn this critical piece of information may cause severe issues in the design of such cooperative systems. In this paper, we address this problem by investigating a two-pair two-way relay channel with an intermittently available relay. In the model, each pair of users need to exchange their messages within their own pair via the shared relay. The shared relay, however, is only intermittently available for the users to access. The accessing activities of different pairs of users are governed by independent Bernoulli random processes. Our main contribution is the characterization of the capacity region to within a bounded gap in a symmetric setting, for both delayed and instantaneous state information at transmitters. An interesting observation is that the bottleneck for information flow is the quality of state information (delayed or instantaneous) available at the relay, not those at the end users. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first result regarding how the shared intermittent relay should cooperate with multiple pairs of users in such a two-way cooperative network.Comment: extended version of ISIT 2015 pape

Opportunistic Interference Management for Multicarrier systems

We study opportunistic interference management when there is bursty interference in parallel 2-user linear deterministic interference channels. A degraded message set communication problem is formulated to exploit the burstiness of interference in M subcarriers allocated to each user. We focus on symmetric rate requirements based on the number of interfered subcarriers rather than the exact set of interfered subcarriers. Inner bounds are obtained using erasure coding, signal-scale alignment and Han-Kobayashi coding strategy. Tight outer bounds for a variety of regimes are obtained using the El Gamal-Costa injective interference channel bounds and a sliding window subset entropy inequality. The result demonstrates an application of techniques from multilevel diversity coding to interference channels. We also conjecture outer bounds indicating the sub-optimality of erasure coding across subcarriers in certain regimes.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, a shorter version of this work will appear in the proceedings of ISIT 201

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 Mitigation Through Limited Receiver Cooperation: Symmetric Case

Interference is a major issue that limits the performance in wireless networks, and cooperation among receivers can help mitigate interference by forming distributed MIMO systems. The rate at which receivers cooperate, however, is limited in most scenarios. How much interference can one bit of receiver cooperation mitigate? In this paper, we study the two-user Gaussian interference channel with conferencing decoders to answer this question in a simple setting. We characterize the fundamental gain from cooperation: at high SNR, when INR is below 50% of SNR in dB scale, one-bit cooperation per direction buys roughly one-bit gain per user until full receiver cooperation performance is reached, while when INR is between 67% and 200% of SNR in dB scale, one-bit cooperation per direction buys roughly half-bit gain per user. The conclusion is drawn based on the approximate characterization of the symmetric capacity in the symmetric set-up. We propose strategies achieving the symmetric capacity universally to within 3 bits. The strategy consists of two parts: (1) the transmission scheme, where superposition encoding with a simple power split is employed, and (2) the cooperative protocol, where quantize-binning is used for relaying.Comment: To appear in IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Taormina, October 2009. Final versio

Interference Mitigation Through Limited Receiver Cooperation

Interference is a major issue limiting the performance in wireless networks. Cooperation among receivers can help mitigate interference by forming distributed MIMO systems. The rate at which receivers cooperate, however, is limited in most scenarios. How much interference can one bit of receiver cooperation mitigate? In this paper, we study the two-user Gaussian interference channel with conferencing decoders to answer this question in a simple setting. We identify two regions regarding the gain from receiver cooperation: linear and saturation regions. In the linear region receiver cooperation is efficient and provides a degrees-of-freedom gain, which is either one cooperation bit buys one more bit or two cooperation bits buy one more bit until saturation. In the saturation region receiver cooperation is inefficient and provides a power gain, which is at most a constant regardless of the rate at which receivers cooperate. The conclusion is drawn from the characterization of capacity region to within two bits. The proposed strategy consists of two parts: (1) the transmission scheme, where superposition encoding with a simple power split is employed, and (2) the cooperative protocol, where one receiver quantize-bin-and-forwards its received signal, and the other after receiving the side information decode-bin-and-forwards its received signal.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 69 pages, 14 figure