Achievable Rates for Multiuser Interference Relay Channel

We consider the interference relay channel (IRC) where a single relay assists the communications between multiple source-destination links under the half-duplex (HD) constraint. We assume each source has an independent message and its transmitted signal may cause interference at the other destinations. We assume each node only estimates its backward channels and has no knowledge of its forward channels as well as the other links. The role of the relay is to generate signals to cooperate with the intended signal and mitigate the interference at all destinations. Specifically, we propose coding schemes and transmission strategies for 2-user AWGN IRC with two source-destination pairs. We compare the performance of the proposed IRC coding schemes with that of a TDMA strategy where each source-destination pair communicates in alternative time slots with the assistance of the relay. Our simulation results based on practical turbo codes as underlying constituent codes show that the proposed transmission strategies result in a significant performance improvement over TDMA strategy in terms of outage probability and throughput.