Degrees of Freedom of Two-Cluster MIMO Multiway Relay Interference Channels Using Blind Interference Neutralization

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the degrees of freedom (DoF) of a two-cluster multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiway relay interference channel (mRIC), where there are two relays and two users per cluster. In this channel, users within the same cluster exchange messages among themselves with the help of two relays. We first obtain the DoF upper bound of the considered MIMO mRIC based on cut-set bound. Then, we propose a novel transmission strategy, blind interference neutralization (BIN), to approach the DoF upper bound. This new method utilizes the overheard information at two relays and focuses on the beamforming matrix designs at two relays so that the channel state information (CSI) at users is not required. Through theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, we show that the DoF upper bound can be obtained by using the BIN scheme. From simulation results, we show that the proposed BIN scheme can provide significant performance gain over the conventional time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme in terms of DoF. In addition, we show that the BIN scheme is a superior approach to the existing signal space alignment (SSA) schemes for the considered mRIC.