Implementation of rate-adaptive integer forcing compression in distributed wireless relay networking

Cooperative distributed relay networking is one way to enable wireless communication among users lacking required infrastructure. An important application of such networks is to restore cell network coverage in the case of emergencies such as severe power outages or natural disasters. One example of distributed relay networking is compress-and-forward relaying where the relay nodes inside the relay network compress their observations before forwarding them to the receiver. Recently, integer forcing source coding (IFSC), which is based on lattice vector quantization, has been studied as a compression scheme in compress-and-forward relaying and cloud radio access networks. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end low computational complexity integer forcing compression strategy which we denote as rate-adaptive integer forcing (RAIF) compression. The proposed compression strategy uses IFSC to quantize observations of the relay network after optimal distribution of the quantization bits. This is shown to enhance the system throughput compared to existing strategies. Simulations are used to verify the obtained results.