  A 3-user device-to-device (D2D) communications scenario is studied where each
user wants to send and receive a message from each other user. This scenario
resembles a 3-way communication channel. The capacity of this channel is
unknown in general. In this paper, a sum-capacity upper bound that
characterizes the degrees-of-freedom of the channel is derived by using
genie-aided arguments. It is further shown that the derived upper bound is
achievable within a gap of 2 bits, thus leading to an approximate sum-capacity
characterization for the 3-way channel. As a by-product, interesting analogies
between multi-way communications and multi-way relay communications are
concluded.
