On the Capacity of the Diamond Half-Duplex Relay Channel

We consider a diamond-shaped dual-hop communication system consisting a source, two parallel half-duplex relays and a destination. In a single antenna configuration, it has been previously shown that a two-phase node-scheduling algorithm, along with the decode and forward strategy can achieve the capacity of the diamond channel for a certain symmetric channel gains [1]. In this paper, we obtain a more general condition for the optimality of the scheme in terms of power resources and channel gains. In particular, it is proved that if the product of the capacity of the simultaneously active links are equal in both transmission phases, the scheme achieves the capacity of the channel.