The Degrees of Freedom of the 2-Hop, 2-User Interference Channel with Feedback

Abstract: The layered two-hop, two-flow interference network is considered that consists of two sources, two relays and two destinations with the first hop network between he sources and the relays and the second hop network between relays and destinations both being i.i.d. Rayleigh fading Gaussian interference channels. Two feedback models are studied. In the first one, called the delayed channel state information at the sources (delayed CSI-S) model, the sources know all channel coefficients with a finite delay but the relays have no side information whatsoever. In the second feedback model, referred to as the limited Shannon feedback model, the relays know first hop channel coefficients instantaneously and the second hop channel with a finite delay and one relay knows the received signal of one of the destinations with a finite delay and the other relay knows the received signal of the other destination with a finite delay but there is no side information at the sources whatsoever. It is shown in this paper that under both these settings, the layered two-hop, two-flow interference channel has 4/3 degrees of freedom. The result is obtained by developing a broadcast-channel-type upper-bound and new achievability schemes based on the ideas of retrospective interference alignment and retro-cooperative interference alignment, respectively.