Discrete-time Gaussian interfere-relay channel

In practical wireless relay communication systems, nondestination nodes are assumed to be idle not receiving signals while the relay sends messages to a particular destination node, which results in reduced bandwidth efficiency. To improve the bandwidth efficiency, we relax the idle assumption of non-destination nodes and assume that non-destination nodes may receive signals from sources. We note that the message relayed to a particular node in such a system gives rise to interference to other nodes. To study such a more general relay system, we consider, in this paper, a relay system in which the relay first listens to the source, then routes the source message to the destination, and finally produces interference to the destination in sending messages for other systems. We obtain capacity upper and lower bounds and study the optimal method to deal with the interference as well as the optimal routing schemes. From analytic results obtained, we find the conditions on which the direct transmission provides higher transmission rate. Next, we find the conditions, by numerical evaluation of the theoretical results, on which it is better for the destination to cancel and decode the interference. Also we find the optimal source power allocation scheme that achieves the lower bound depending on various channel conditions. We believe that the results provided in this paper will provide useful insights to system designers in strategically choosing the optimal routing algorithms depending on the channel conditions.