Low SNR — When only decoding will do

We investigate the issue of distributed receiver cooperation in a multiple-relay network with memoryless independent fading channels, where the channel state information can't be obtained. The received signals at distributed receiving nodes are first compressed or quantized before being sent to the decoder via rate-limited cooperation channels for joint processing. We focus on the low SNR regime and analyze the capacity bounds using network equivalence theory and a multiple-layer binning peaky frequency shift keying (FSK). When the received signals at the relaying nodes are in low SNR regime and the cooperation rates are not sufficiently high, compressed/quantized observations at relaying nodes become useless and only decoding can help.