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A Unified Relay Framework with both D-F and C-F Relay Nodes
Decode-and-forward (D-F) and compress-and-forward (C-F) are two fundamentally
different relay strategies proposed by (Cover and El Gamal, 1979).
Individually, either of them has been successfully generalized to multi-relay
channels. In this paper, to allow each relay node the freedom of choosing
either of the two strategies, we propose a unified framework, where both the
D-F and C-F strategies can be employed simultaneously in the network. It turns
out that, to fully incorporate the advantages of both the best known D-F and
C-F strategies into a unified framework, the major challenge arises as follows:
For the D-F relay nodes to fully utilize the help of the C-F relay nodes,
decoding at the D-F relay nodes should not be conducted until all the blocks
have been finished; However, in the multi-level D-F strategy, the upstream
nodes have to decode prior to the downstream nodes in order to help, which
makes simultaneous decoding at all the D-F relay nodes after all the blocks
have been finished inapplicable. To tackle this problem, nested blocks combined
with backward decoding are used in our framework, so that the D-F relay nodes
at different levels can perform backward decoding at different frequencies. As
such, the upstream D-F relay nodes can decode before the downstream D-F relay
nodes, and the use of backward decoding at each D-F relay node ensures the full
exploitation of the help of both the other D-F relay nodes and the C-F relay
nodes. The achievable rates under our unified relay framework are found to
combine both the best known D-F and C-F achievable rates and include them as
special cases
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