This paper studies incremental relay strategies for a two-user Gaussian
relay-interference channel with an in-band-reception and
out-of-band-transmission relay, where the link between the relay and the two
receivers is modelled as a degraded broadcast channel. It is shown that
generalized hash-and-forward (GHF) can achieve the capacity region of this
channel to within a constant number of bits in a certain weak relay regime,
where the transmitter-to-relay link gains are not unboundedly stronger than the
interference links between the transmitters and the receivers. The GHF relaying
strategy is ideally suited for the broadcasting relay because it can be
implemented in an incremental fashion, i.e., the relay message to one receiver
is a degraded version of the message to the other receiver. A
generalized-degree-of-freedom (GDoF) analysis in the high signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR) regime reveals that in the symmetric channel setting, each common relay
bit can improve the sum rate roughly by either one bit or two bits
asymptotically depending on the operating regime, and the rate gain can be
interpreted as coming solely from the improvement of the common message rates,
or alternatively in the very weak interference regime as solely coming from the
rate improvement of the private messages. Further, this paper studies an
asymmetric case in which the relay has only a single single link to one of the
destinations. It is shown that with only one relay-destination link, the
approximate capacity region can be established for a larger regime of channel
parameters. Further, from a GDoF point of view, the sum-capacity gain due to
the relay can now be thought as coming from either signal relaying only, or
interference forwarding only.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Inf. Theor