Compress-and-Forward Relaying Based on Symbol-Wise Joint Source-Channel Coding

We propose a new compress-and-forward implementation for the relay channel based on joint source-channel coding techniques. The relay performs scalar quantization of its observation in combination with a redundant index mapping. Our system utilizes the correlation between the quantized signal and the direct-link observation of the transmitted symbols as redundancy for error protection on the relay-to-destination link. In order to fully exploit this correlation the destination requires iterative decoding to recover the quantized observation sent by the relay. Once regenerated, this quantized signal is optimally combined with the direct-link observation to decode the message conveyed by the source. By quantizing the observed signal itself rather than a measure on the reliability of the information bits (e.g. a posteriori probabilities from a decoder), and by using digital communication methods on the relay- to-destination link our system yields superior performance to that of amplify-and-forward, decode- and-forward and previous implementations of compress-and-forward based on soft decoding.