MIMO Four-Way Relaying

Two-way relaying in wireless systems has initiated a large research effort during the past few years. Nevertheless, it represents only a specific traffic pattern and it is of interest to investigate other traffic patterns where such a simultaneous processing of information flows can bring performance advantage. In this paper we consider a \emph{four-way relaying} multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scenario, where each of the two Mobile Stations (MSs) has a two-way connection to the same Base Station (BS), while each connection is through a dedicated Relay Station (RS). The RSs are placed in such a way that one RS and the terminals associated with it do not interfere with the other RS, and vice versa. We introduce and analyze a two-phase transmission scheme to serve the four-way traffic pattern defined in this scenario. Each phase consists of combined broadcast and multiple access. We analyze the sum-rate of the new scheme for Decode-and-Forward (DF) operational model for the RS. We compare the performance with state-of-the-art reference schemes, based on two-way relaying with DF. The results indicate that the sum-rate of the two-phase four-way relaying scheme largely outperforms the four-phase scheme, while closely approaching the performance achievable when the BS is replaced by two BSs.