Achievable Sum-Rate of MU-MIMO Cellular Two-Way Relay Channels: Lattice Code-Aided Linear Precoding

We derive a new sum-rate lower bound of the multiuser multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) cellular two-way relay channel (cTWRC) which is composed of a base station (BS) and a relay station (RS), both with multiple antennas, and non-cooperative mobile stations (MSs), each with a single antenna. In the first phase, we show that network coding based on decode-and-forward relaying can be generalized to arbitrary input cardinality through proposed lattice code-aided linear precoding, despite the fact that precoding is permitted only at the BS due to non-cooperation among the MSs. In addition, a new sum-rate lower bound for the second phase is derived by showing that the two spatial decoding orders at the BS and MSs for one-sided zero-forcing dirty-paper-coding must be identical. From the fundamental gain of network coding, our sum-rate lower bound achieves the full multiplexing gain regardless of the number of antennas at the BS or RS, and strictly exceeds the previous lower bound which is based on traditional multiuser decoding in the first phase. Furthermore, it is shown that our lower bound asymptotically achieves the sum-rate upper bound in the presence of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) asymmetry in high SNR regime, and sufficient conditions for this SNR asymmetry are drawn.