General rules of passing/returning reference of array (not pointer) to/from a function?

We can pass reference of an array to a function like:

void f(int (&a)[5]);

int x[5];
f(x);     //okay
int y[6];
f(y);     //error - type of y is not `int (&)[5]`.

Or even better, we can write a function template:

template<size_t N>
void f(int (&a)[N]); //N is size of the array!

int x[5];
f(x);     //okay - N becomes 5
int y[6];
f(y);     //okay - N becomes 6

Now my question is, how to return reference of an array from a function?

I want to return array of folllowing types from a function:

int a[N];
int a[M][N];
int (*a)[N];
int (*a)[M][N];

where M and N is known at compile time!

What are general rules for passing and returning compile-time reference of an array to and from a function? How can we pass reference of an array of type int (*a)[M][N] to a function?

EDIT:

Adam commented : int (*a)[N] is not an array, it's a pointer to an array.

Yes. But one dimension is known at compile time! How can we pass this information which is known at compile time, to a function?