Achievable Rates of Two-Hop Interference Networks with Conferencing Relays

In this paper, we consider a two-hop interference network, which consists of two source-destination pairs and two relay nodes connected with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) limited out-of-band conferencing links. Assuming that the amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying scheme is adopted, this network is shown to be equivalent to a two-user interference channel (IC). By deploying two IC decoding schemes, i.e., single-user decoding and joint decoding, respectively, we characterize the achievable rate regions with a two-stage iterative optimization method. The associated convergence issue is also studied. Furthermore, we compare the rates in the high SNR regime. Finally, simulation results show that relay conferencing can significantly improve the system performance under certain channel conditions.