Dynamic rank acquisition via rateless compute-and-forward

It is by now well-known that significant gains are possible in network communication if users exploit the multiaccess and broadcast aspects of the wireless medium through cooperation. Many cooperative schemes focus on how to exploit the statistical dependencies between transmitted and received signals. However, it has recently become clear that it is sometimes advantageous to exploit the algebraic structure of the signals through the use of structured codes. Here, we develop a rateless scheme for relays in a network to gather equations of transmitted messages to pass along to the destinations. Equations whose coefficients are closer to the fading coefficients can be decoded sooner by the relays.