Urs Niesen

The Approximate Capacity of the Gaussian n-Relay Diamond Network

We consider the Gaussian “diamond” or parallel relay network, in which a source node transmits a message to a destination node with the help of N relays. Even for the symmetric setting, in which the channel gains to the relays are identical and the channel gains from the relays are identical, the capacity of this channel is unknown in general. The best known capacity approximation is up to an additive gap of order N bits and up to a multiplicative gap of order N2, with both gaps independent of the channel gains. In this paper, we approximate the capacity of the symmetric Gaussian N-relay diamond network up to an additive gap of 1.8 bits and up to a multiplicative gap of a factor 14. Both gaps are independent of the channel gains and, unlike the best previously known result, are also independent of the number of relays N in the network. Achievability is based on bursty amplify-and-forward, showing that this simple scheme is uniformly approximately optimal, both in the low-rate as well as in the high-rate regimes. The upper bound on capacity is based on a careful evaluation of the cut-set bound. We also present approximation results for the asymmetric Gaussian N-relay diamond network. In particular, we show that bursty amplify-and-forward combined with optimal relay selection achieves a rate within a factor O(log4(N)) of capacity with preconstant in the order notation independent of the channel gains.

Computation Alignment: Capacity Approximation Without Noise Accumulation

Consider several source nodes communicating across a wireless network to a destination node with the help of several layers of relay nodes. Recent work by Avestimehr has approximated the capacity of this network up to an additive gap. The communication scheme achieving this capacity approximation is based on compress-and-forward, resulting in noise accumulation as the messages traverse the network. As a consequence, the approximation gap increases linearly with the network depth. This paper develops a computation alignment strategy that can approach the capacity of a class of layered, time-varying wireless relay networks up to an approximation gap that is independent of the network depth. This strategy is based on the compute-and-forward framework, which enables relays to decode deterministic functions of the transmitted messages. Alone, compute-and-forward is insufficient to approach the capacity as it incurs a penalty for approximating the wireless channel with complex-valued coefficients by a channel with integer coefficients. Here, this penalty is circumvented by carefully matching channel realizations across time slots to create integer-valued effective channels that are well suited to compute-and-forward. Unlike prior constant gap results, the approximation gap obtained in this paper also depends closely on the fading statistics, which are assumed to be i.i.d. Rayleigh.

Interference Alignment in Dense Wireless Networks

We consider arbitrary dense wireless networks, in which n nodes are placed in an arbitrary (deterministic) manner on a square region of unit area and communicate with each other over Gaussian fading channels. We provide inner and outer bounds for the n × n-dimensional unicast and the n × 2n-dimensional multicast capacity regions of such a wireless network. These inner and outer bounds differ only by a factor O(log(n)), yielding a fairly tight scaling characterization of the entire regions. The communication schemes achieving the inner bounds use interference alignment as a central technique and are, at least conceptually, surprisingly simple.