Degrees of Freedom of Two-Hop Wireless Networks: "Everyone Gets the Entire Cake"

Abstract: We show that fully connected two-hop wireless networks with K sources, K relays and K destinations have K degrees of freedom both in the case of time-varying channel coefficients and in the case of constant channel coefficients (in which case the result holds for almost all values of constant channel coefficients). Our main contribution is a new achievability scheme which we call Aligned Network Diagonalization. This scheme allows the data streams transmitted by the sources to undergo a diagonal linear transformation from the sources to the destinations, thus being received free of interference by their intended destination. In addition, we extend our scheme to multi-hop networks with fully connected hops, and multi-hop networks with MIMO nodes, for which the degrees of freedom are also fully characterized.