A Partial Compress-and-Forward Strategy for Relay-Assisted Wireless Networks Based on Rateless Coding

In this work, we propose a novel partial compress-and-forward (PCF) scheme for improving the maximum achievable transmission rate of a diamond relay network with two noisy relays. PCF combines conventional compress-and-forward (CF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) protocols, enabling one relay to operate alternately in the CF or the AF mode, while the other relay works purely in the CF mode. As the direct link from the source to the destination is unavailable, and there is no noiseless relay in the diamond network, messages received from both relays must act as side information for each other and must be decoded jointly. We propose a joint decoder to decode two Luby transform (LT) codes received from both relays corresponding to the same original message. Numerical results show that PCF can achieve significant performance improvements compared to decode-and-forward (DF) and pure CF protocols when at least the channels connected to one of the relays are of high quality.