Wireless Multicast Relay Networks with Limited-Rate Source-Conferencing

We investigate capacity bounds for a wireless multicast relay network where two sources simultaneously multicast to two destinations with the help of a full-duplex relay node. The two sources and the relay use the same channel resources (i.e. co-channel transmission). We assume Gaussian channels with time-invariant channel gains which are known by all nodes. The two source nodes are connected by orthogonal limited-rate error-free conferencing links. By extending the proof of the converse for the Gaussian relay channel and introducing two lemmas on conditional (co-)variance, we present two genie-aided outer bounds of the capacity region for this multicast relay network. We extend noisy network coding to use source cooperation with the help of the theory of network equivalence. We also propose a new coding scheme, partial-decode-and-forward based linear network coding, which is essentially a hybrid scheme utilizing rate-splitting and messages conferencing at the source nodes, partial decoding and linear network coding at the relay, and joint decoding at each destination. A low-complexity alternative scheme, analog network coding based on amplify-and-forward relaying, is also investigated and shown to benefit greatly from the help of the conferencing links and can even outperform noisy network coding when the coherent combining gain is dominant.