Non-Regenerative Multi-Way Relaying: Combining the Gains of Network Coding and Joint Processing

In this paper, we consider a non-regenerative multi-group multi-way relaying scenario in which each group consists of multiple half-duplex nodes. Each node wants to share its data with all other nodes within its group. The transmissions are performed via an intermediate non-regenerative half-duplex multi-antenna relay station, termed RS, which spatially separates the different groups. In our proposal, all nodes simultaneously transmit to RS during a common multiple access phase and RS retransmits linearly processed versions of the received signals back to the nodes during multiple broadcast (BC) phases. We propose a novel transmit strategy which exploits analog network coding (ANC) and efficiently combines spatial transceive processing at RS with joint receive processing at each node over multiple BC phases. A closed-form solution for an ANC aware relay transceive filter is introduced and closed-form solutions for the joint receive processing filters at the nodes are presented. Furthermore, self-interference cancellation and successive interference cancellation are exploited at the nodes to improve the joint receive processing. By numerical results, it is shown that the proposed transmit strategy significantly outperforms existing multi-way strategies.