Exploiting the N-to-1 mapping in compress-and-forward relaying

In this paper, a forward decoding procedure is developed for the compress-and-forward (CF) relaying scheme. This procedure uses a layered framework and is based on exploiting a feature of the N-to-1 mapping inherent in the underlying Wyner-Ziv binning. It is shown that exploiting this mapping enables the relaxation of the constraint on the rate of the relay codewords representing the bin indices. For the cooperative multimessage network, the proposed procedure achieves the same rate region as the short-message noisy network coding (SNNC) scheme. However, this procedure is more advantageous for other networks including the two networks presented herein. The first netwo