Cooperative strategies and capacity theorems for relay networks

Coding strategies that exploit node cooperation are developed for relay networks. Two basic schemes are studied: the relays decode-and-forward the source message to the destination, or they compress-and-forward their channel outputs to the destination. The decode-and-forward scheme is a variant of multihopping, but in addition to having the relays successively decode the message, the transmitters cooperate and each receiver uses several or all of its past channel output blocks to decode. For the compress-and-forward scheme, the relays take advantage of the statistical dependence between their channel outputs and the destination's channel output. The strategies are applied to wireless channels, and it is shown…