Capacity region of the deterministic multi-pair bi-directional relay network

Abstract: In this paper we study the capacity region of the multi-pair bidirectional (or two-way) wireless relay network, in which a relay node facilitates the communication between multiple pairs of users. This network is a generalization of the well known bidirectional relay channel, where we have only one pair of users. We examine this problem in the context of the deterministic channel interaction model, which eliminates the channel noise and allows us to focus on the interaction between signals. We characterize the capacity region of this network when the relay is operating at either full-duplex mode or half-duplex mode (with non adaptive listen-transmit scheduling). In both cases we show that the cut-set upper bound is tight and, quite interestingly, the capacity region is achieved by a simple equation-forwarding strategy.