A Generalized Mixed Strategy for Multiterminal Relay Networks

In their fundamental paper, Cover and El Gamal presented three basic coding strategies -decode-and-forward, compress-and-forward and a mixed strategy based on partial decode-and-forward and compress-and-forward -which are still the basis for many recent relaying protocols. So far, only parts of their work are applied to networks of relay nodes, e. g., the decode-and-forward as well as compress-and-forward approach. This work generalizes a mixed approach of partial decode-and-forward and compress-and-forward to networks of relay nodes. We further highlight how the "successive refinement problem" and the "broadcast channel problem with degraded message sets" are applied in our approach. Finally, we formulate achievable rates for the discrete memoryless relay channel consisting of two relay nodes.