Generalized signal alignment for MIMO two-way X relay channels

We study the degrees of freedom (DoF) of MIMO two-way X relay channels. Previous work studied the case N <; 2M, where N and M denote the number of antennas at the relay and each source, respectively, and showed that the maximum DoF of 2N is achievable when N <; ⌊8M/5⌋ by applying signal alignment (SA) for network coding and interference cancelation. This work considers the case N > 2M where the performance is limited by the number of antennas at each source node and conventional SA is not feasible. We propose a generalized signal alignment (GSA) based transmission scheme. The key is to let the signals to be exchanged between every source node align in a transformed subspace, rather than the direct subspace, at the relay so as to form network-coded signals. This is realized by jointly designing the precoding matrices at all source nodes and the processing matrix at the relay. Moreover, the aligned subspaces are orthogonal to each other. By applying the GSA, we show that the DoF upper bound 4M is achievable when M ≤ ⌊ 2N/5 ⌋ (M is even) or M ≤ ⌊ 2N-1 /5 ⌋ (M is odd). Numerical results also demonstrate that our proposed transmission scheme is feasible and effective.