  We investigate the benefits of relays in multi-user wireless networks with
bursty user traffic, where intermittent data traffic restricts the users to
bursty transmissions. To this end, we study a two-user bursty MIMO Gaussian
interference channel with a relay, where two Bernoulli random states govern the
bursty user traffic. We show that an in-band relay can provide a degrees of
freedom (DoF) gain in this bursty channel. This beneficial role of in-band
relays in the bursty channel is in direct contrast to their role in the
non-bursty channel which is not as significant to provide a DoF gain. More
importantly, we demonstrate that for certain antenna configurations, an in-band
relay can help achieve interference-free performances with increased DoF. We
find the benefits particularly substantial with low data traffic, as the DoF
gain can grow linearly with the number of antennas at the relay. In this work,
we first derive an outer bound from which we obtain a necessary condition for
interference-free DoF performances. Then, we develop a novel scheme that
exploits information of the bursty traffic states to achieve them.
