A new inner bound for the interference relay channel

This paper proposes a new coding scheme for the discrete memoryless interference channel with a dedicated relay. The scheme is built upon rate-splitting encoding, layered noisy network coding, and joint decoding. The result is extended to two Gaussian channels. For the Gaussian channel whose relay is connected to the destinations via orthogonal links we indirectly show that the proposed scheme achieves a bounded gap to the capacity region under certain channel conditions. For the Gaussian channel wherein the relay receives and transmits in the same spectral resource with the transmitters the numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves higher sum rate than other compress-forward-based schemes. This work, together with our previous work [1], shows that noisy network coding can be extended by the well-known rate-splitting technique of the interference channel to achieve a bounded gap to the capacity region of some multi-unicast networks.