Layered quantize-forward for the two-way relay channel

This paper proposes two new coding schemes for the discrete memoryless two-way relay channel. The main target is to show the benefits of compress-forward without Wyner-Ziv binning and of layered relaying in networks wherein a relay is to help multiple destinations, that may have unequal channel quality and/or have access to different side information. Numerical results for a Gaussian channel show that the new coding schemes outperform variants of compress-forward relaying and offer a good trade-off between achievable rates and complexity and decoding delay. The idea can also be applied to other relay networks.