Multipair Two-way Half-Duplex Relaying with Massive Arrays and Imperfect CSI

We consider a two-way half-duplex relaying system where multiple pairs of single antenna users exchange information assisted by a multi-antenna relay. Taking into account the practical constraint of imperfect channel estimation, we study the achievable sum spectral efficiency of the amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols, assuming that the relay employs simple maximum ratio processing. We derive an exact closed-form expression for the sum spectral efficiency of the AF protocol and a large-scale approximation for the sum spectral efficiency of the DF protocol when the number of relay antennas, $M$, becomes sufficiently large. In addition, we study how the transmit power scales with $M$ to maintain a desired quality-of-service. In particular, our results show that by using a large number of relay antennas, the transmit powers of the user, relay, and pilot symbol can be scaled down proportionally to $1/M^\alpha$, $1/M^\beta$, and $1/M^\gamma$ for certain $\alpha$, $\beta$, and $\gamma$, respectively. This elegant power scaling law reveals a fundamental tradeoff between the transmit powers of the user/relay and pilot symbol. Finally, capitalizing on the new expressions for the sum spectral efficiency, novel power allocation schemes are designed to further improve the sum spectral efficiency.