On message lengths for noisy network coding

Quantize-map-forward (QMF) and noisy network coding (NNC) differ primarily from compress-forward relaying in that relays do not hash their quantization bits. Two further differences are that source nodes use “long”-message repetitive encoding and destination nodes use simultaneous joint decoding. Recent work has shown that classic “short”-message encoding combined with backward decoding achieves the same rates as QMF and NNC. A simplified proof of this result is given.