Alternate MIMO relaying with three AF relays using interference alignment

In this paper, we study a two-hop half-duplex relaying network with one source, one destination, and three amplify-and-forward (AF) relays equipped with M antennas each. We consider alternate transmission to compensate for the inherent loss of capacity pre-log factor 1/2 in half duplex mode, where source transmit message to two relays and the other relay alternately. The inter-relay interference caused by alternate transmission is aligned to make additional degrees of freedom (DOFs). It is shown that the proposed scheme enables us to exploit 3M/4 DOFs compared with the M/2 DOFs of conventional AF relaying. More specifically, suboptimal linear filter designs for a source and three relays are proposed to maximize the achievable sum-rate. We verify using some selected numerical results that the proposed filter designs give significant improvement of the sum-rate over a naive filter and conventional relaying schemes.