In a bi-directional relay channel, two nodes wish to exchange independent messages over a shared wireless half-duplex channel with the help of relays. Recent work has considered information theoretic limits of the bi-directional relay channel with a
single relay. In this work we consider bi-directional relaying with multiple relays. We derive achievable rate regions and outer bounds for half-duplex protocols with multiple decode and forward relays and compare these to the same protocols with amplify and forward relays in an additive white Gaussian noise channel. We consider three novel classes of half-duplex protocols: the (m,2) 2 phase protocol with m relays, the (m,3) 3 phase protocol with m relays, and general (m, t) Multiple Hops and Multiple Relays (MHMR) protocols, where m is the total number of relays and 3<t< m+3 is the number of temporal phases in the protocol. The (m,2) and (m,3) protocols extend previous bi-directional relaying protocols for a single m=1 relay, while the new (m,t) protocol efficiently combines multi-hop routing with message-level network coding. Finally, we provide a comprehensive treatment of the MHMR protocols with decode and forward relaying and amplify and forward relaying in the Gaussian noise, obtaining their respective achievable rate regions, outer bounds and relative performance under different SNRs and relay geometries, including an analytical comparison on the protocols at low and high SNR.
In a bi-directional relay channel, two nodes wish to exchange independent messages over a shared wireless half-duplex channel with the help of a relay. In this paper, we derive achievable rate regions for four new half-duplex protocols and compare th
ese to four existing half-duplex protocols and outer bounds. In time, our protocols consist of either two or three phases. In the two phase protocols, both users simultaneously transmit during the first phase and the relay alone transmits during the second phase, while in the three phase protocol the two users sequentially transmit followed by a transmission from the relay. The relay may forward information in one of four manners; we outline existing Amplify and Forward (AF), Decode and Forward (DF) and Compress and Forward (CF) relaying schemes and introduce the novel Mixed Forward scheme. The latter is a combination of CF in one direction and DF in the other. We derive achievable rate regions for the CF and Mixed relaying schemes for the two and three phase protocols. In the last part of this work we provide a comprehensive treatment of 8 possible half-duplex bi-directional relaying protocols in Gaussian noise, obtaining their respective achievable rate regions, outer bounds, and their relative performance under different SNR and relay geometries.
