Capacity of Linear Two-hop Mesh Networks with Rate Splitting, Decode-and-forward Relaying and Cooperation

Abstract—A linear mesh network is considered in which asingle user per cell communicates to a local base station via adedicated relay (two-hop communication). Exploiting the possiblyrelevant inter-cell channel gains, rate splitting with successivecancellation in both hops is investigated as a promising solutionto improve the rate of basic single-rate communications. Then,an alternative solution is proposed that attempts to improve theperformance of the second hop (from the relays to base stations)by cooperative transmission among the relay stations. The coop-erative scheme leverages the common information obtained bythe relays as a by-product of the use of rate splitting in thefirst hop. Numerical results bring insight into the conditio ns(network topology and power constraints) under which ratesplitting, with possible relay cooperation, is beneficial. Multi-cellprocessing (joint decoding at the base stations) is also consideredfor reference. I. I NTRODUCTION Wireless mesh networks are currently being investigated fortheir potential to resolve the performance limitations of bothinfrastructure (cellular) and multi-hop (ad hoc) networks interms of quality-of-service and coverage [1]. Basically, meshnetworks prescribe the combination of communication viadirect transmission to infrastructure nodes (base stations) andvia multi-hop transmission through intermediate nodes (relaystations). The latter can generally be mobile terminals, or fixedstations appropriately located by the service provider. Theassessment of the performance of such networks is an openproblem that has attracted interest from different communitiesand fields, especially information-theory [2] [3] and network-ing [4]. Recently, there has also been considerable interest infurther enhancing the performance of infrastructure or meshnetworks by endowing the system with a central processorable to pool the signals received by the base stations andperform joint processing (this scenario is usually referred toas distributed antennas or multi-cell processing) [5].In this paper, we focus on a linear mesh network as sketchedin Fig. 1. It is assumed that one mobile terminal (MT) is active

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