Compute-compress-and-forward

Compute-and-forward (CF) can harness interference in a multi-hop relay network by allowing a relay to decode and forward a combination of source messages. However, the total forwarding rate of the relays belonging to one hop may far exceed the total information rate of the sources, which implies information redundancy and spectral inefficiency. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel relaying strategy termed compute-compress-and-forward (CCF). Compared with CF, our proposed CCF scheme includes an extra compressing stage in which the computed combinations of the relays are compressed to reduce forwarding rates. We design the compressing function and develop a successive recovering algorithm to recover source messages at a destination. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance advantage of CCF over CF.