Coding Strategies for Compress-and-Forward Relaying

Sammanfattning: The deployment of large communication networks with many autonomous devices has opened new possibilities for transmission. In particular cooperation among the different nodes has been identified as an enabling technology to satisfy the increasing demand of resources. This thesis studies different coding strategies for cooperation in relay channels in the form of compress-and-forward.In the first part of this thesis we consider the application of the newly introduced polar codes for compress-and-forward relaying in relay channels with orthogonal receivers. First we construct polar codes for compress-and-forward relaying based on Slepian-Wolf coding for the scenario where the capacity of the relay-destination channel is large enough. We then consider the more general picture where the capacity of the relay-destination channel is arbitrary. As for Wyner-Ziv coding, we employ nested polar codes for source and channel coding that allow for compression at any desired distortion and exploit the correlation between the observations of the source transmission to minimize the transmission rate over the relay-destination channel. This construction allows for transmission at the prominent compress-and-forward rate under some additional constraints.In the second part of this thesis we propose a new coding strategy for compress-and-forward relaying for half-duplex Gaussian channels. Our code construction is based on simple code concatenation for joint source-channel coding at the relay and iterative decoding at the destination. Finally, we propose several realizations of the structure at the relay and different iterative decoding algorithms in order to adapt the construction to different scenarios. Our simulation results show remarkable performance gains over other cooperation strategies such as decode-and-forward and amplify-and-forward in the scenarios where both source-relay and relay-destination links have low signal-to-noise ratios.