Bandwidth efficient compress-and-forward relaying based on joint source-channel coding

We propose a new code design for compress-and-forward relaying over bandlimited relay-to-destination channels. The main contribution of this paper is a code design based on joint (source-channel) coding and modulation that uses the correlation between the observations at the relay and the destination as protection against channel errors. This allows for relay nodes with reduced complexity, shifting most of the processing requirements to the destination node. Moreover, by using scalar quantizers with an entropy constraint our system provides remarkable performance in channel conditions where neither amplify-and-forward nor compress-and-forward efficiently exploit the presence of a relay node. Simulation results confirm the benefits of our proposed system.