In this paper, we consider a parallel relay network where two relays
cooperatively help a source transmit to a destination. We assume the source and
the destination nodes are equipped with multiple antennas. Three basic schemes
and their achievable rates are studied: Decode-and-Forward (DF),
Amplify-and-Forward (AF), and Compress-and-Forward (CF). For the DF scheme, the
source transmits two private signals, one for each relay, where dirty paper
coding (DPC) is used between the two private streams, and a common signal for
both relays. The relays make efficient use of the common information to
introduce a proper amount of correlation in the transmission to the
destination. We show that the DF scheme achieves the capacity under certain
conditions. We also show that the CF scheme is asymptotically optimal in the
high relay power limit, regardless of channel ranks. It turns out that the AF
scheme also achieves the asymptotic optimality but only when the
relays-to-destination channel is full rank. The relative advantages of the
three schemes are discussed with numerical results.Comment: 35 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information
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