Relay aided interference mitigation in cellular networks

We consider a two-user interference channel in the context of a cellular network, where two base stations would like to communicate with their respective mobile stations. The goal of this work is to investigate the throughput gain with the use of an infrastructure relay installed at the cell border. We propose a scheme that features rate-splitting at the sources and partial decode and forward at the relay. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can improve substantially the network throughput as compared to the original network. Furthermore, in some regimes, it can even outperform other more involved cooperation strategies such as network MIMO.