Degrees of freedom for a two-cell relay network with soft handoffs

In this paper we investigate the degrees of freedom of a cellular relay network that consists of two base stations, two mobile stations and four decode-and-forward relays. The base stations and the mobile stations are equipped with M antennas each, whereas the relays are equipped with N antennas each. In addition, each base station has an independent message to each mobile station. The relays are used to froward the messages from the base stations to the mobile station as there is no direct link. We consider three different relaying architectures where the two relays associated with each base station simultaneously or alternately transmit their messages. We derive an upper bound on the degrees of freedom achievable by each relaying architecture as a function of the ratio between N and M. Furthermore, we propose an achievable scheme that uses interference alignment to achieve the upper bound on the DoF for all values of M and N except for 1 ≤ N/M ≤ 5/2. © 2014 IEEE.