Alternate versus simultaneous relaying in MIMO cellular relay networks: A degrees of freedom study

In this paper, a two-hop cellular relay network consisting of two source-destination pairs equipped with M antennas is considered where each source is assisted by two decode-and-forward relays operating in half-duplex mode and the relays are equipped with N antennas. The DoF of the system is investigated for both simultaneous and alternate relaying configurations. For each relay configuration, an outer bound on the degrees of freedom (DoF) is developed. A new achievable scheme is proposed that meets the upper bound on the maximum DoF for all values of M andN except for M <; N <; 5M/2.