Practical Quantize-and-forward Schemes for the Frequency Relay Channel

We consider static and quasi-static relay channels in which the source-destination and relay-destination signals are assumed to be orthogonal and thus have to be recombined at the destination. We propose cheap relaying schemes that are optimized from the knowledge of the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of the source-relay and relay-destination channels at the relay. For this purpose the scheme under investigation is assumed to be scalar and have to minimize the mean square error between the source signal and its reconstructed version at the destination. We propose a quantize-and-forward (QF) scheme, which is a generalization of techniques based on joint source-channel coding. To further improve the receiver performance when the source-relay SNR is relatively poor we propose a Maximum Likelihood detector (MLD) designed for the QF protocol.