On the achievable degrees of freedom of alternate MIMO relaying with multiple AF relays

In this paper, we consider a two-hop relaying network where one source, one destination, and multiple amplify-and-forward (AF) relays equipped with M antennas operate in a half-duplex mode. In order to compensate for the inherent loss of capacity pre-log factor of 1/2 due to half-duplex relaying, we propose a new transmission protocol which combines alternate relaying and inter-relay interference alignment. We prove that the proposed scheme can (i) exploits M degrees of freedom (DOFs) and (ii) perfectly recover the pre-log factor loss if the number of relays is at least six. From our selected numerical results, we show that our proposed scheme gives significant improvement over conventional AF relaying which offers only M/2 DOFs.