Capacity of a Class of Multi-Source Relay Networks

Characterizing the capacity region of multi-source wireless relay networks is one of the fundamental issues in network information theory. The problem is, however, quite challenging because the transmission of other sessions acts as inter-user interference when there exist multiple Source-Destination (S-D) pairs in the network. By focusing on a special class of networks, the authors show that the capacity can be found. Namely, they study a linear finite-field network with time-varying channels, which exhibits broadcast, interference, and fading natures of wireless communication. They observe that fading can play an important role in mitigating inter-user interference effectively for both single-hop and multi-hop networks.