Rate-achievability strategies for two-hop interference flows

We consider a basic model for two-hop transmissions of two information flows which interfere with each other. In this model, two sources simultaneously transmit to two relays (in the first hop), which then simultaneously transmit to two destinations (in the second hop). While the transmission during the first hop is essentially the transmission over a classical interference channel, the transmission in the second hop enjoys an interesting advantage. Specifically, as a by-product of the Han-Kobayashi transmission scheme applied to the first hop, each of the relays (in the second hop) has access to some of the data that is intended to the other destination, in addition to its own data. As recently observed by Simeone et al., this opens the door to cooperation between the relays. In this paper, we observe that the cooperation can take the form of distributed MIMO broadcast, thus greatly enhancing its effectiveness at high SNR. However, since each relay is only aware of part of the data beyond its own, full cooperation is not possible. We propose several approaches that combine MIMO broadcast strategies (including "dirty paper") with standard non-cooperative strategies for the interference channel. Numerical results are provided, which indicate that our approaches provide substantial benefits at high SNR.