Asymmetric Compute-and-Forward: Going beyond one hop

We consider a two-hop relay model in which multiple sources communicate with a single destination via multiple distributed relays. We propose an asymmetric Compute-and-Forward (CoF) scheme that allows lattice coding with different coarse and fine lattices at the sources. The proposed scheme is motivated by the observation that, in an asymmetric CoF system, a higher transmission power at a source does not necessarily translate to a higher achievable information rate. We show that significant performance enhancement can be achieved by optimizing the transmission powers of the sources below their respective budgets. Further, the asymmetric construction of lattice coding allows the relays to conduct different modulo operations to reduce their forwarding rates, thereby supporting higher rates at the sources. However, modulo operations in general incur information loss, and so need to be carefully designed to ensure that the destination can successfully recover the source messages. As such, we propose a novel successive recovering algorithm for decoding at the destination, and establish sufficient conditions to guarantee successful recovery. Numerical results are provided to verify the superiority of our proposed scheme over other schemes.