  When multiple users share the same resource for physical layer cooperation
such as relay terminals in their vicinities, this shared resource may not be
always available for every user, and it is critical for transmitting terminals
to know whether other users have access to that common resource in order to
better utilize it. Failing to learn this critical piece of information may
cause severe issues in the design of such cooperative systems. In this paper,
we address this problem by investigating a two-pair two-way relay channel with
an intermittently available relay. In the model, each pair of users need to
exchange their messages within their own pair via the shared relay. The shared
relay, however, is only intermittently available for the users to access. The
accessing activities of different pairs of users are governed by independent
Bernoulli random processes. Our main contribution is the characterization of
the capacity region to within a bounded gap in a symmetric setting, for both
delayed and instantaneous state information at transmitters. An interesting
observation is that the bottleneck for information flow is the quality of state
information (delayed or instantaneous) available at the relay, not those at the
end users. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first result regarding
how the shared intermittent relay should cooperate with multiple pairs of users
in such a two-way cooperative network.
