Consider the broadcast relay channel (BRC) which consists of a source sending
information over a two user broadcast
channel in presence of two relay nodes that help the transmission to the
destinations. Clearly, this network with
five nodes involves all the problems encountered in relay and broadcast
channels. New inner bounds on the capacity
region of this class of channels are derived. These results can be seen as a
generalization and hence unification of
previous work in this topic. Our bounds are based on the idea of
recombination of message bits and various effective
coding strategies for relay and broadcast channels. Capacity result is
obtained for the semi-degraded BRC-CR, where
one relay channel is degraded while the other one is reversely degraded. An
inner and upper bound is also presented
for the degraded BRC with common relay (BRC-CR), where both the relay and
broadcast channel are degraded which is
the capacity for the Gaussian case. Application of these results arise in the
context of opportunistic cooperation
of cellular networks.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in proc. IEEE ISIT, June 201