Relay Channel - General Discrete-time Memoryless Relay Channel

General Discrete-time Memoryless Relay Channel

A discrete memoryless single-relay channel can be modelled as four finite sets, and, and a conditional probability distribution on these sets. The probability distribution of the choice of symbols selected by the encoder and the relay encoder is represented by .

o------------------o | Relay Encoder | o------------------o A | | y1 x2 | | V o---------o x1 o------------------o y o---------o | Encoder |--->| p(y,y1|x1,x2) |--->| Decoder | o---------o o------------------o o---------o

There exist three main relaying schemes: Decode-and-Forward, Compress-and-Forward and Amplify-and-Forward. The first two schemes were first proposed in the pioneer article by Cover and El-Gamal.

• Decode-and-Forward (DF): In this relaying scheme, the relay decodes the source message in one block and transmits the re-encoded message in the following block. The achievable rate of DF is known as .

• Compress-and-Forward (CF): In this relaying scheme, the relay quantizes the received signal in one block and transmits the encoded version of the quantized received signal in the following block. The achievable rate of CF is known as subject to .

• Amplify-and-Forward (AF): In this relaying scheme, the relay sends an amplified version of the received signal in the last time-slot. Comparing with DF and CF, AF requires much less delay as the relay node operates time-slot by time-slot. Also, AF requires much less computing power as no decoding or quantizing operation is performed at the relay side.