Asymptotic Capacity of Large Relay Networks with Conferencing Links

In this correspondence, we consider a half-duplex large relay network, consisting of one source-destination pair and N relay nodes, each of which is connected with a subset of the other relays via signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)-limited out-of-band conferencing links. The asymptotic achievable rates of two basic relaying schemes with the "p-portion" conferencing strategy are studied: For the decode-and-forward (DF) scheme, we prove that the DF rate scales as O(log(N)); for the amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme, we prove that it asymptotically achieves the capacity upper bound in some interesting scenarios as N goes to infinity.