Achievable Rates of the MIMO Multiway Distributed-Relay Channel with Full Data Exchange

We consider efficient communications over the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiway distributed relay channel (MDRC) with full data exchange, where each user, equipped with multiple antennas, broadcasts its message to all the other users via the help of a number of distributive relays. We propose a physical-layer network coding (PNC) based scheme involving linear precoding for channel alignment, nested lattice coding for PNC, and lattice-based precoding for interference mitigation. We show that distributed relaying achieves the same sum-rate as cooperative relaying in the high SNR regime in most scenarios, which implies that the proposed scheme with distributed relays is more suitable for practical systems than the schemes with cooperative relays.