Symmetric relaying based on partial decoding and the capacity of a class of relay networks

Symmetric relaying is a method of relaying in which the relays can decode the message of other relays in the network in addition to the source message. In this paper an achievable rate is presented for a symmetric two-relay network based on partial decoding. The strategy make use of familiar techniques such as product binning, regular encoding/sliding window decoding and regular encoding/backward decoding. The proposed rate is shown to subsume the previously proposed rate for feed-forward relay network based on decode-andforward. This rate is also used to establish the capacity of a generalisation of Aref network called ‘semideterministic relay network with no interference at the relays’ and independent relay inputs.