A New Achievability Scheme for the Relay Channel

In this paper, we propose a new coding scheme for the general relay channel. This coding scheme is in the form of a block Markov code. The transmitter uses a superposition Markov code. The relay compresses the received signal and maps the compressed version of the received signal into a codeword conditioned on the codeword of the previous block. The receiver performs joint decoding after it has received all of the B blocks. We show that this coding scheme can be viewed as a generalization of the well-known Compress-And-Forward (CAF) scheme proposed by Cover and El Gamal. Our coding scheme provides options for preserving the correlation between the channel inputs of the transmitter and the relay, which is not possible in the CAF scheme. Thus, our proposed scheme may potentially yield a larger achievable rate than the CAF scheme. ∗This work was supported by NSF Grants CCR 03-11311, CCF 04-47613 and CCF 05-14846, and was presented in part at IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Lake Tahoe, CA, September 2007.