Compress-and-forward scheme for a relay network: Approximate optimality and connection to algebraic flows

We study a wireless relay network, with a single source and a single destination. Our main result is to show that an appropriate compress-and-forward scheme supports essentially the same reliable data rate as the quantize-map-and-forward and noisy network coding schemes [1], [2]; thus, it is approximately optimal - in the sense the data rate is a universal constant away from the cut-set upper bound. We characterize the compress-and-forward scheme through an abstract flow formulation, a generalization of flow on linking systems. This characterization allows for efficient computation of the minimal amount of information that has to flow through each node in the network.