Abstract
In this paper, we consider a two-hop interference network, which consists of two source-destination pairs and two relay nodes connected with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) limited out-of-band conferencing links. Assuming that the amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying scheme is adopted, this network is shown to be equivalent to a two-user interference channel (IC). By deploying two IC decoding schemes, i.e., single-user decoding and joint decoding, respectively, we characterize the achievable rate regions with a two-stage iterative optimization method: First, we fix the source power pair and maximize the sum rate over the relay combining vector; second, we fix the relay combining vector and optimize the source power pair. Specifically, for single-user decoding, we design a new routine to compute the optimal solution for the first subproblem, which is more efficient than the existing scheme; and for the second subproblem, we develop an iterative algorithm, with the closed-form solution for each iteration. Furthermore, it is revealed that the AF scheme with relay conferencing achieves the full degree-of-freedom (DoF), which outperforms the case without relay conferencing. Finally, simulation results show that relay conferencing can significantly improve the system performance under certain channel conditions.