Relaying strategies for the interference relay channel

In this paper, the two-user interference relay channel (IRC) is studied. Transmission schemes for this network are compared. Namely, compress-and-forward (CF) and functional decode-and-forward (FDF) are presented. In CF, the relay establishes cooperation with the users by compressing its observation and forwarding it to the receivers. In FDF, the relay decodes a linear combination of the transmitted signals, and forwards this linear combination. We compare these schemes with decode-and-forward (DF) and with a upper bound on the rates in the IRC. It turns out that these schemes outperform DF, and approach the upper bound for some cases.